Sophiatown Renaissance:

Sophiatown Renaissance:
A Reader
(ed.)
by
Ntongela Masilela
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section I: Autobiographies and Memoirs.
CHAPTER
1 A SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDHOOD (1954)
by Nadine Gordimer
2 SOPHIATOWN (1956)
by Trevor Huddleston
3 THE HOUSE OF TRUTH (1957)
by Anthony Sampson
1 INTO THE SLUMS (1959)
by Ezekiel Mphahlele
2 THE PAGAN WOMAN (1960)
by Noni Jabavu
3 “DECISION TO LEAVE” (1960)
by Alfred Hutchinson
4 “ARRIVAL IN LONDON” (1961)
2
by Todd Matshikiza
5 “CAULDRON IN SOPHIATOWN” (1963)
by Bloke Modisane
6 THE CELL (1965)
by Ruth First
7 REFLECTIONS (1966)
By Albie Sachs
8 “MY NAME IS DUGGIE” (1969)
by Dugmore Boetie
9 “Sophiatown or Triomf?” (1975)
by Miriam Tlali
10 “THE SOUTH I KNOW” (1978)
by Peter Magubane
11 “KIPPIE’S MEMORIES” (1981)
by Kippie Moeketsi
12 DISTRICT SIX BOYHOOD (1981)
by Richard Rive
13 NOTES FROM A QUIET BACKWATER (1982)
by Bessie Head
14 RETURN TO JOHANNESBURG (1985)
by Ellen Kuzwayo
15 TWENTY THOUSAND STRONG WE MARCHED
(1986)
by Helen Joseph
16 OTHER FACES OF KOFIFI (1987)
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by Don Mattera
17 “THE CUBAN BROTHERS AND THE
MANHATTAN BROTHERS” (1987)
by Miriam Makeba (1987)
18 WHO THE HELL IS THIS NEWCOMER (1987)
by Godfrey Moloi
19 THE ROAD TO HOLLY CROSS (1991)
by Maggie Resha
20 KING KONG, BRAVE AS A LION (1999)
by Sylvester Stein
21 “THIS IS AMERICA” (2004)
by Hugh Masekela
Section II: Essays
22 THE LINGUISTIC REVOLUTION (1953)
by Peter N. Raboroko
23 THE EUROPEAN AND ASIAN DIARY (1954)
by Ruth First
24 THE MEANING OF BANTU EDUCATION
(1954/55)
by Duma Nokwe
25 A NEW WORLD UNFOLDS (1955)
by Alfred Hutchinson
4
26 THE FREEDOM CHARTER (1955)
27 FAREWELL SPEECH (1955)
by Trevor Huddleston
28 TOWARDS A CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF SOUTH
AFRICA (1956)
by A. M. Kathrada
29 THE STORY OF BETHAL (1956)
by Henry Nxumalo
30 THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE (1957)
by Harry Bloom
31 THE STARS OF JAZZ (1957)
by Todd Matshikiza
32 WHAT THE SOUTH AFRICAN NEGRO READS
AND WRITES (1957)
by Ezekiel Mphahlele
33 DOLLY RATHEBE (1957)
by Can Themba
34 THE AFRICANISTS AND THE CONGRESS (1958)
by Dan Tloome
35 SATYGRAHA IN SOUTH AFRICA (1959)
by Fatima Meer
36 THE AFRICAN JOURNALIST (1959)
by Tom Hopkins
37 FREEDOM FOR AFRICANS MEANS FREEDOM
FOR ALL (1959)
5
by Robert Sobukwe
38 1959: WHAT IS APARTHEID? (1959)
by Nadine Gordimer
39 THE HISTORY OF THE INDIANS IN SOUTH
AFRICA: A HUNDRED-YEAR JOURNEY (1959)
by G. R. Naidoo
40 FROM VELD TO THE CITY: THE BANTU DRAMA
(1960)
by Anthony Sampson
41 THE CREATOR OF KING KONG JAZZ OPERA
(1960)
by Mona Glasser
42 SHORT STORY WRITING IN BLACK SOUTH
AFRICA (1962)
by Bloke Modisane
43 WRITING IN SOUTH AFRICA (1963)
By Nat Nakasa
44 THE FABULOUS DECADE: THE FIFTIES (1965)
by Lewis Nkosi
45 SOUTHERN AFRICA---THE BIG QUESTIONMARK FOR THE OAU (1965)
by Matthew Nkoana
46 THE ROLE OF THE BARD IN A CONTEMPORARY
AFRICAN COMMUNITY (1967)
by Archie Mafeje
47 CAN’T YOU WRITE ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE
(1971)
6
by Arthur Maimane
48 MAKE MUSIC (1977)
by Bessie Head
49 THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY ON 20th
CENTURY BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN WRITING
(1978)
by Bob Leshoai
50 BLACK CHILD (1982)
by Peter Magubane
51 LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND THE STRUGGLE
FOR LIBERATION IN SOUTH AFRICA (1986)
by Daniel P. Kunene
52 SOUTH AFRICA: THE STRUCTURE OF THINGS
THEN (1998)
by David Goldblatt
Section III: Poetry
53 Dennis Brutus
-------Early Poem
-------Longing
-------The Mob
-------Poem about Prison
-------On The Island
--------Under House Arrest
54 Arthur Nortje
---------Thumbing a Lift
---------Midnight
---------Two Women
7
---------Soliloquy: South Africa
---------Spell Cold and Ironic
55 James Matthews
---------“It is said”
---------“We matched the white man;s arrival”
---------“Valley of plenty is what it is called”
---------“Can this white man speak for me?”
---------“Opening the newspapers you will see”
---------“The summer of our despair”
---------“Flowers just don’t grow anymore”
56 Keorapetse Kgositsile
---------The Air I Hear
---------Mayibuye iAfrika
---------Random Notes to My Son
---------To My Mother
Section IV: Short Stories
57 MUZI
by Lewis Nkosi
58 THE DIGNITY OF BEGGING
by Bloke Modisane
59 THE URCHIN
by Can Themba
60 MITA
by Casey Motsisi
61 THE PARK
by James Matthews
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62 THE DEPARTURE
by Peter Clarke
63 THE LEMON ORCHARD
by Alex La Guma
64 LOOKING FOR A RAIN GOD
by Bessie Head
65 GRIEG ON A STOLEN PIANO
by Ezekiel Mphahlele
66 THE PRODIGAL
by Simiso Ngwane
67 KAFFIR WOMAN
by Arthur Maimane
68 MACHADO
by Alfred Hutchinson
69 THE BENCH
by Richard Rive
Part V: Novels
70 CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
by Alan Paton
71 MARU
by Bessie Head
72 IN THE FOG OF THE SEASON’S END
by Alex La Guma
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73 THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD
by Nadine Gordimer
74 THE WANDERERS
by Ezekiel Mphahlele
75 EMERGENCY
by Richard Rive
Part VI: Plays
10
Section I:
Autobiographies
11
and
Memoirs
Chapter 1
A South African Childhood
by
Nadine Gordimer
Growing up in one part of a vast young country can be very different
from growing up in another, and in South Africa this difference is not
only a matter of geography. The division of the people into two great
races---black and white---and the subdivision of the white into
Afrikaans- and English-speaking groups provide a diversity of
cultural heritage that can make two South African x children seem
almost as strange to each other as if they had come from different
countries. The fact that their parents, if they are English-speaking,
frequently have come from different countries complicates their
backgrounds still further. My father came to South Africa from a
village in Russia; my mother was born and grew up in London. I
remember, when I was about eight years old, going with my sister
and mother and father to spend a long weekend with a cousin of my
father’s who lived in the Orange Free State. After miles and miles of
sienna-red plowed earth, after miles and miles of silk-fringed mealies
standing as high as your eyes on either side of the road and ugly
farmhouses where women in bunchy cotton dresses and sunbonnets
stared after the car as we passed (years later, when I saw
12
“Oklahoma!” in a Johannesburg theatre, I recalled that scene), we
reached the dorp where the cousin lived, in a small white house with
sides that were dust-stained in a wavering wash, like rust, for more
than a foot above the ground. There two little girls slept on beds of a
smothering softness we had never felt before---feather beds brought
from Eastern Europe---and drank tea drawn from a charming
contraption, a samovar. There---to our mother’s horror---we were
given smoked duck, flavored with garlic, at breakfast. The two
children of the house spoke only Afrikaans, like the Boer children
who played in the yards of the mean little houses od either side, and
my sister and I, quesy from the strange food and able to speak only
English, watched their games with a mixture of hostility and
wistfulness.
How different it all was from our visit to our mother’s sister, in
Natal! There, with the “English” side of the family, in the green,
softly contoured hills and the gentle meadows of sweet grass near
Balgowan, we might almost have been in England itself. There our
cousins Roy and Humphrey rode like young lords about their
father’s beautiful farm, and spoke the high, polite, “pure” English
learned in expensive Natal private schools that were staffed with
masters imported from English universities. And how different were
both visits from our life in one of the gold-mining towns of the
Witwatersrand, near Johannesburg, in the Transvaal.
There are nine of these towns, spread over the distance of roughly a
hundred and forty miles and wesy of Johannesburg. The one in
which we lived was on the east side---the East Rand, it is called---and
it had many distinctions, as distinctions are measured in that part of
the world.First of all, it was one of the oldest towns, having got itself
a gold strike, a general store, a few tents, and a name before 1890. In
the pioneer days, my father had set himself up in a small, one-man
business as a watchmaker and jeweler, and during the twenties and
thirties, when the town became the most rapidly expanding on the
Witwatersrand, he continued to live there with his family. In the
richest gold-mining area in the world, it became the richest square
mile or so. All around us, the shafts went doen and the gold came up;
13
our horizon was an Egyptian-looking frieze of man-made hills of
cynanide sand, called “dumps,” because that is what they are---great
mounds of waste matter dumped on the surface of the earth after the
gold-bearing ore has been blasted below, hauled up, and pounded
and washed into yielding its treasure. In the dusty month before
spring---in August, that is---the sand from the dumps blew under the
tightly shut doors of every house in the town and eveloped the heads
of the dumps themselves in a swirling haze, lending them some of
the dignity od clou-capped mountains. It is characteristic of the
Witwatersrand that any feature of the landscape that strikes the eye
always does so because it is a reminder of something else; considered
on its own merits, the landscape is utterly without interest---flat, dry,
and barren.
In our part of the East Rand, the yellowish-white pattern of the
cyanide dumps was broken here and there by the head of a vblack
hill rising out of the veld. These hills were man-made, too, but they
did not have the geometrical, pyramidal rigidity of the cynanide
dumps, and they were so old that enough real earth blown on to
them to hold a growth of sparse grass and perhaps even a sinewy
peppercorn or peach tree, sprung up, no doubt, out of garden refuse
abandoned there by somebody from the nearby town. These hills
were also dumps, but through their scanty natural covering a
blackness clearly showed---even a little blueness, the way black hair
shines---for they were coal dumps, made of coal dust.
The coal dumps assume, both because of their appearance and
because of the stories and warnings we heard about then, something
of a diabolical nature. In our sedate little colonial tribe, with its ritual
tea parties and tennis parties the coal dump could be said to be our
Evil Mountain; I use the singular here because when I think of these
dumps, I think of one in particular---the biggest one, the one that
stood fifty yards beyond the last row of houses in the town where we
lived. I remember it especially well because on the other side of it,
hidden by it, was the local nursing home, where, when my sister and
I were young and the town was small, all the mothers went to have
their babies and all the children went to have their tonsillectomies--14
where, in fact, almost everyone was born, endured an illness, or died.
Our mother had several long stays in the place, over a period of two
or three years, and during these stays our grandmother took us on a
daily visit across the veld to see her. Immediately luch was over, she
would spend an hour dressing us, and then, brushed and beribboned
and curled, we would set off. We took a path that skirted the coal
dump, and there it was at our side most of the way---a dirty, scarred
old mountain, collapsing into the fold of a small ravine here,
supporting a twisted peach three there, and showing bald and black
through patchy grass. A fence consisting of two threads of barbed
wire looped at intervals through low rusted-iron poles, which once
had surrounded it completely, now remained only in places,
conveying the idea of a taboo rather than providing an effectual
means of isolation. The whole coal dump looked dead, forsaken, and
harmless enough, but my sister and I walked softly and looked at it
out of the corners of our eyes, half fascinated, half afraid, because we
knew it was something else---inert. Not dead by any means, but inert.
For we had seen. Coming back from the nursing home in the earlywinter dusk, we had seen the strange glow in the blad patches the
grass did not cover, and in the runnels made by the erosion of
summer wind and rain we had seen the hot blue waver of flame. The
coal dump was alive. Like a beast of prey, it woke to life in the dark.
The matter-of-fact truth was that these coal dumps, relics of the pregold-strike era when collieries operated in the district, were burning.
Along with the abondened mine workings underground, they had
caught fire at some time ot other in their years of disuse, and had
continued to burn, night and day, ever since. Neither rain nor time
could put the fires out, and in some places, even on the coldest winter
days, we would be surprised to feel the veld warm beneath the soles
of our shoes, and, if we cut out a clod, faintly steaming. That dump
on the outskirts of the town where we lived is still burning today. I
have asked people who have studied such things how long it may be
expected to go on burning before it consumes itself. Nobody seems to
know; it shares with the idea of Hades its heat and vague eternity.
15
But perhaps its fierce heart is being subdued gradually. Apparently,
no one can ever remember, these days, the nasty incidents connected
with the dump, incidents that were fresh in memory during our
childhood. Perhaps there is no need for anyone to remember, for the
town now has more vicarious and less dangerous excitements to offer
children than the thrill of running quickly across a pile of black dust
that may at any moment cave in and plunge the adventurer into a
bed of incandescent coals. In our time, we knew a f girl to whom this
had happened, and our mother remembered a small boy who had
disappeared entirely under a sudden landslide of terrible glowing
heat. Not even gis bones had been recovered, but the girl we knew
survived to become a kind of curiosity about the town. She had been
playing on the dump with her friends, and all at once had found
herself sunk thigh-deep in living coals and hot ashes. Her friends had
managed to pull her out of this fiery quicksand, but she was horribly
burned. When we saw her in the street, we used to be unable to keep
our eyes from the tight-puckered skin of her calves, and the still
tighter skin of her hands, which drew up her fingers like claws.
Despite, or because of, these awful warnings, my sister and I longed
to run quickly across the lower slopes of the dump for ourselves, and
several times managed to elude surveillance long enough to do so.
An d once, in the unbearable terror and bliss of excitement, we
clutched each other on the veld below while, legs pumping wildly,
our cousin Roy, came from Natal to spend the holidays with us, rode
a bicycle right to the top of the dump and down the other side,
triumphant and unharmed.
In the part of South Africa where we lived, we had not only fire
under our feet; we had, too, a complicationof tunnels as intricate as
one of those delicate chunks of worm cast you find on the seashore.
All the towns along the Witwatersrand, and the older parts of
Jphannesburgitself, are undermined. Living there, you think about it
as little as you think about the fact that, whatever your work and
whatever your life, your reason for performing it where you do and
living it where you do is the existence of the gold mines. Yet you are
never allowed to forget entirely that the ground is not solid beneath
you. In Johannesburg, sitting eight or ten stories up, in the office of
16
your stockbroker or in your dentist’s waiting room, you feel the
strong shudder of an earth tremor; the vase of flowers skids toward
the magazines on the table, the gossip of the ticker-tape machine is
drowned. These tremors, never strong enough to do any serious
damage, are commonplace. Bt ascribing them to the fact that the
Witwatersrand is extensively undermined, I am inadvertently taking
sides in a long, discreet controversy between the seismologists and
the Chamber of Mines. The seismologists say that the tremors are not,
geologically speaking, earth tremors at all but are caused by rocks
falling from the ceilings of either working or abandoned mines. The
Chamber of Minesinsists that they are natural and not man-caused
phenomena. And jerry-builders take advantage of the dispute,
greeting the evidence of cracked walls in houses with a shrug of the
shoulders that lets the responsibility fall on God ot the Chamber od
Mines, take your choice.
Our life in the mining town, in one of the ugliest parts of a generally
beautiful continent, was narrow and neighborly---a way of life that,
while it commonly produces a violent reaction of rebelliousness in
adolescence, suits young children very well. The town had sprun g
into existence because of the mines, had grown up around the mines.
The shopkeepers had come---first with their tents, then with their
shanties, and, at last, with their corner sites and neon signs---to fill
and profit from the miners’ needs. At the start, the miners wanted
only the necessities of life---stoves and workmen’s clothing and meat.
Soon they wanted everything---cinemas and shiny wooden cocktail
cabinets and tinned asparagus. My father’s little business was a good
example of how trade grew into the full feather of provincial luxury
from scrawny beginnings in utility. When he arrived in the town, just
before the Boer War, he used to tramp from mine to mine carrying a
cardboard suitcase full of pocket watches. The watches sold for less
than a dollar each. They ticked as loudly as the crocodile who
pursues Captain Hook in “Peter Pan,” and they were as strong as
they sounded. They were a necessity for the mineworkers, who
found that ordinary watches became rusted and ruined in no time by
the damp and heat underground. So my father, a tiny, dapper, smallfeatured youth with feet no bigger than a woman’s, made his living
17
by selling watches to, and repairing watches for, the great, hefty
Afrikaners and the tough Scots and Irishmen who produced gold. He
had a little wood-and-iron cottage, where he lived with a black
retriever named Springbok, two German roller canaries, and his
watchmaker’s worktable.
By the time my father married my mother, he was living in the newly
built local hotel, owned a horse and trap, and had rented a glassfronted shop, where he sold diamond engagement rings. By the time
my sister and I were old enough to notice such things, his shop had
showcases full of silver sports cups, walnut mantel clocks, stainlesssteel cutlery, and costume jewelry from America and Czechoslovakia.
A stone-deaf relative had been imported from Leningrad to do the
watch repairing; he sat behind an engraved glass partition, out of
sight of the customers, who were now townspeople---the families of
other shopkeepers, municipal officials, civil servants---as well as
white workers from the mines. The white miners wore new Swiss
water-and-shock-proof watches. The only potential customers for
cheap pocket watches were now the tribal Africans---migrant
laborers who were employed to do all the really hard work in the
mines---and these bewildered, primitive men, still wearing earrings
and dressed in ochre-dyed blankets, mostly made their purchases at
governmenet-concession stores on mine property and did not
venture into a jeweller’s shop in the town.
The mine people an d the townspeople did not by any means
constitute a homogeneous population; they remained two welldefined groups. Socially, the mine people undoubtedly had the edge
on the people of the town. Their social hierarchy had been set up
first, and was the more rigid and powerful. There was a general
manager before was a mayor. But even when the town did create
civic dignitaries for itself, even when we did get a country club, there
were those among us who neither knew nor cared about the social
scaffolding that was going up around them, whereas at each mine the
G.M. was not only the leader of society but also the boss, and if one
did not revere him at first, one had y to respect him as the second.
The dignitaries on both sides---the G.M.s and their officials from the
18
mines, and the city fathers, the presidents of clubs in the town, and so
on---invited each other to dinners and receptions, and the teams of
the sports clubs of mine and town competed with each other, but
there was little mixing on the more intimate levels of sociability. The
mine officials and their wives and families lived on “the property;”
that is, the area of ground, sometimes very large, that belonged to
each mine and that included, in addition to the shaft heads and the
mine offices and the hospital, a sports ground, a swimming pool, a
rtecreation club, and the houses of the officials---all built by the mine.
The G.M. lived in the largest hiuse, usually a spacious and very
pleasant one, situated in a garden so big that one might almost have
called it a park. The gardenwas kept in full bloom all year around,
right through the sharp, dry Transvaal winter, by African labor
diverted from the mines, and the liquor stock indoors was ample and
lavishly dispensed. The assistant manager’s house was smaller, but
decent enough; then came the underground manager’s (he was in
charge of the four-sided barracks, with all its windows opening on a
courtyard and only obne gateway, always guarded, to the world
without, in which the African laborers were fed and housed in
celibacy, having left their families in distant kraals), and then the
mine secretary’s, and so on down the salary and social scale, the
houses getting smaller, the gardens getting less elaborate. Most of the
mine families lived only a few miles out from the town, but their selfsufficiency surrounded them like a moat. Their offspring could go
from the cradle to the grave without having anything to do with the
town other than attending its high school, placing weekly orders with
the butcher and the grocer, and paying three visits to church---one for
christening, one for marrying, one for burying.
We, of course, were town people. All my childhood, we lived in the
little house, in obne of the town’s earliest suburbs, that my parents
had bought before I was born. Other people moved to the newer
suburbs of flat-roofed villas, pseudo-Tudor houses, and latere,
houses inspired by American magazines, with picture windows
looking out on the bare veld. But we stayed. Ours was a bungalowtype house with two bow windows an d a corrugated-iron roof, like
almost all the other houses that were b uilt in the Witwatersrand
19
gold-mining towns during the twenties and early thirties. It stood in
a small garden, one of several similar houses on a street along whose
sidewalk grew leathery-leaved trees, which in summer put out
bunches of creamy, bell-shaped flowers. When my sister and I were
little, we used to fit these flowers over our fingertips, like tiny hats;
when we were old enough to own bicycles, we would ride up and
down beneath the trees, feeling rather than hearing the swish of their
leaves above our heads. The trees were kept clipped in the shape of
bullets, in order that they might not interfere with the telephone
wires, and so were not beautiful. There was, in fact, no beauty in the
whole town. We children simply took it for granted that beaity---hills,
trees, buildings of elegance---was not a thing to be expected of
ordinary, everyday life.
The town had already grown up and hardened, as it were, into
permanent shape before its leaders became sophisticated enough to
consider orthodox municipal planning, and so, although it kept
expanding in all directions, it remained essentially a one-street affair.
As is so often true in such cases, that street was too narrow, and the
land on either side of it was too valuable to make widening feasible.
The street had the authentic jostle and bustle of a thriving business
center, and we children loved to walk “downtown” on Saturday
mornings with our mother. This was as much a social as a shopping
expedition. During our early years, the only places of refreshment in
the town were two or three hotel bars (in South Africa, closed to
women anyway) and the Greek “cafés,” where black-haired Minos or
Mavrodatos solg cigarettes, sweets, polony, and fruit, and where one
could sit at a table with a flyblown cloth and be served terribly weak
tea or coffee adulterated with chicory. But by the middle thirties there
were one or two genteel teashops, where the local women met for
midmorning refreshment, and the Greeks had installed shiny soda
fountains, which we children used to patronize heavily after
Saturday matinees at the local cinema.
Most of the shops were family businesses, but with prosperity came
Woolworth’s---from whose gramaphone-record counter dated jazz
swung out into the main street---and branches of various big
20
department stores in Johannesburg. The owners of the family
businesss became the city fathers, and their families became the “old
families” pf the town. We were one of these “old families”of the
town. We were one of these “old families” and were known to
everyone in the town and even at the times--- there by sight rather
than by association. My fathertook no part in civic affairs and
remained what he had always been, a simple man and a shopkeeper,
but my mother, a woman of considerable energy an d not much
scope, served on endless committees. Some years, she was president
of several organizations at once, with a secretaryship ot two thrown
in as well. She baked cakes and she prepared reports; she was
honorary cashier at charity concerts, and she taught first aid to
children. Her position was a curious one. Unlike most of the other
women, she did not confine herself to the particular section of the
community to which she belonged. The fact was that she didn’t seem
to belong to any particular section. Although my father kept some
sort of token allegiance to the Jewish community, contributing to the
upkeep of the ugly little synagogue and even going to pray there
once a year, on the Day of Atonement, my mother did not fit in very
well with the ladies of the congregation. She got on much better with
the Scots ladies of the town, and I remember her working (or, rather,
baking) like a beaver for the annual cake-and-sweet sale in aid of the
Presbyterian Church.
Our life was very much our mother’s life, and so our pleasures, into
which we plunged with gusto, knowing no others, were charity
bazaars, the local eisteddfods that were held in the town hall by
members of the Welsh community, and dancing displays by the
pupils of local teachers (my sister and I were often perfomers), along
with---staple stimulation for the entire population---the cinema. In
summer, we went to the municipal swimming bath. Walks or
rambles about the outskirts of the town were unknown to us, except
for those furtive excursions in the direction of the burning dump.
There was nothing to see beyond the limits of the suburbs but “the
location”---an urban slum where the African industrial workers and
servants were huddled in segregation from their while employers--and a damped-up pond, created by waste water pumped from one of
21
the mines, in which a yellow cyanide dump was reflected, its image
broken by bulrushes and the occasional passage of a small duck.
There were junior and senior state schools in the town, where
education for white children was free, but my sister and I were sent
as day scholars to the local convent; the Dominican nuns had come.
Like everything else, with the town’s prosperity. Many of the
townspeople, torn between the businessman’s natural suspicion of
getting something for nothing and the fear that their children would
be converted to Catholicism (the town was largely Protestant),
resolved the issue by sending their children to neither the state school
nor the convent but to boarding school in Johannesburg. My mother,
a fearless nomad when it came to social and religious barriers, had no
such misgivings. My sister and I spent our school life at the convent,
and were taught English by a bun-faced nun with a thick German
accent. At school, I showed some of my mother’s bland disregard for
the sheeplike group consciousness of the town, and struck up a long
and close friendship with the daughter of an official at one of the
oldest a nd most important mines. So it was that I came to cross the
tacit divide between the mines and the town, and to know the
habitat, domestic life, and protocol of “the mine people.”
Like middle-class children everywhere who lived within reasonable
reach of an ocean, we were taken to the sea every year. The hot
months of December and January are the popular season for family
holidays in South Africa, the Indian Ocean is the nearest ocean for
Transvaalers, and Durban---four hundred miles from Johannesburg--is the nearest city on the Indian Ocean coast. So almost every
summer we spent our three weeks in Durban or in a village on the
South Coast, not far from Durban. We could, of course, have gone yo
Lourenço Marques, the fgay little port in Portuguese territory, which
is about the samne distance from Johannesburg, but we never did,
because that was a place to which grownups went without their
children (and preferably without their wives or husbands) and only
in the winter season of July and August. When we were very small,
we adored Durban, where we stayed in one of the solid, cool, highceilinged hotels along the Marine Parade and, leaning out of the
22
steamy bathroom in the evenings, after we had been sent off to bed,
could see the colored lights strung like beads on an abacus from
lamppost to lamppst along the sea front while the trams thundered
past, and a strange fading and rising cry---a mingling of laughter,
squeals, and juke-box and hurdy-gurdy music---rose, between the
roaring advance and hissing retreat of the sea, from the amusement
park.
When we grew a little older and entered that dreamy, remote, soulful
state that comes in early adolescence, we found the crowded beach,
the sand lumpy with popcorn, and the vulgarly lit sea front, where
all the wires and cables of an electrically contrived fairyland showed
on the lampposts in the light of day, utterly abhorrent. Nothing
would have persuaded us to enter the amusement park, from which
wonderful Teddy bears and even a felt Mickey Mouse had once
come, won by our mother by dint of Heaven knows how many
tickets at the sideshows, and placed at the foot of our beds for
discovery in the morning. Nothing would have bored us more than
the slow, chugging trips around the bay on a pleasure launch named
the Sarie Marais, which only a few years back had had all the solemn
thrill of departure for a new continent. And most of all we revolted
against the nagging of the Indian venders on the beach, with their
“Mangoes? Litchis? Banana? Very nice p-ruit? Grandailla parfait? Ice
cream?” Gesture one angrily away, and another, sweating, scowling,
barefoot on the burning sand but dressed from head to foot in white
drill embroidered with some unlikely name---Joe’s Place, or the Top
Hat---came at you like a persistent blue-bottle. You must want
something. “No, no, no, no!” my sister would shout in rage, and the
vender would stare at her, waiting for her to change her mind.
What we wanted at this stage in our lives, and what we usually got,
since, like many parents, our acquired the tastes of their children,
being formed rather than forming, was a holiday at a South Coast
village beyond the reach of even the little single-track railway. In this
village, the hotel was a collection of thatch-roofed rondavels, the
water was free of refuse, and the beach---ah, the beach lay gleaming,
silent, mile after mile, looping over flower-strewn rocks; there were,
23
indeed, many beaches, and always one where for the whole day there
would be no footprints in the sand but my sister’s ans mine. In fine
weather, the village was, I suppose, a paradise of sorts. In front of the
little hotel was the warm, bright sea, and, curving around behind it,
hill after hill covered with the improbable green sheen of sugar cane,
which, moving in the breeze, softened every contour like some rich
pile, or like that heavy bloom of pollen which makes hazy the inner
convolutions of certain flowers. Streams oozed down from the hills
and could be discovered by the ear only, since they were completely
covered by low, umbrella-shaped trees (these are seen to better
advantage on the hills around Durban, where their peculiarly
Japanese beauis unobstructed by undergrowth), latticed and knitted
and strung together by a cat’s cradle of lianas and creepers. My sister
and I would push and slither our way inro these dim, secret places,
glimpsing, for the instant in which we leaned over, the greenish,
startling image of our faces in water that endlessly reflected back to
the ferns the Narcissus image of their own fronds.
More cheerfully, in the bush along the road we would sometimes
hear that incredibly lighthearted, gossipy chatter which means that
monkeys are about. The little Natal coast monkeys are charming
creatures, in appearance exactly the sort of monkey toy manufactures
choose; in fact, they are just what one would wish a monkey to be.
They bound about in the treetops, nonchalant and excitable at the
same time, and unless they are half tame, as they have become
around some of the roadhouses on the outskirts of Durban, they
move off almost too quickly to be clearly seen; you find yourself left
standing and gazing at the branches as they swing back into place
and listening to the gaiety as it passes out of hearing, and the whole
thing has the feeling of a party to which you have not been invited. If
the monkeys, like distant relatives who wish to make it clear that
thereis no connection, ignored us, there were creatures who, because
their movements were attuned to some other age of slime or rock,
could not escape us. On the trailing plants near the rocks, sleepy
chameleons stalked shakily, or clung swaying, their eyes closed and
their claws, so like minute, cold human hands, holding on for dear
life. If they saw you coming for them, they would go off nervously,
24
high-spepping across the sand, but with a kind of hopelessness, as if
they knew that all you had to do was lean over and pick them up.
And then, unable to bite, scratch, sting, or even to make any protest
other than to hiss faintly and hoarsely, they wrapped their little cold
hands around your finger like a tired child and went as pale as they
could---a lightly apotted creamy beige that was apparently their idea
of approximating the color of human skin.My sister was particularly
fond of these resigned and melancholy creatures. Twice we took one
home to the Transvaal with us on the train, and twice we watched an
d wept in an guish when, after two or three happy months on the
house plant in my mother’s living room, the poor thing lost first his
ability to change color, fading instead to a more ghostly pallor each
day, an d then, literally, his grip, so that he kept falling to the floor.
The Transvaal winter, even indoors, was too much for chameleons.
In the heavy green water of the lagoon at the South Coast village
where we used to stay, there appeared to be no life at all, though
some people said that under the rocks at the bottom there were giant
crabs. When the weather was bad for a few days, and the
combination of bthe sea’s rising and the lagoon’sflooding washed
away the sandbanks between the lagoon and the sea, the dark river
water in the lagoon poured in a deep channel down into the waves,
and the waves mounted the river water, frothing over the swirl.
Decaying palm leaves, the rotten ropes of broken lianas, and fallen
vegetable-ivory fruit, as hard and round as cricket balls, were washed
out of the stagnant bed of the lagoon and brushed you weirdly while
you swam in the sea. Once, late one afternoon, my mother and I were
lying on the sand watching a solitary swimmer who eviden tly did
not mind the dirty sea. Suddenly we saw the rhythmic flaying of his
arms against the water violently interrupted, and then he heaved
clear up into the air, gripping or in the grip of a black shape as big as
he was. My mother was convinced that he had been attacked by a
shark, and went stumbling and flying over the sand to get help from
the hotel. I went, with that instinct to seek human solidarity in the
face of any sort of danger toward humankind, to stand with some
excited children who had been playing with toy boats at the water’s
edge. I was four or five years older than the eldest of them, and I kept
25
holding them back from the water with the barrier of my outspread
arms, like a policeman at a parade. What danger I thought there
could be in two or three inches of water I cannot imagine, but the
idea that there was a monster in the vicinity seemed to make even the
touch of the water’s edge a touch of menace.
In minutes, the wholr village was on the beach, and out there, but
coming nearer with every wave, were the swimmer and the dark
shape, noe together, now apart, now lost, now discovered again. As
the lifesaving rope was unreeled and the volunteer lifesavers
plunged into the sea, supposition was shrill, but hastily d silenced at
the occasional cry of “Look, there he is!” There was a feeling of
special horror, oddly, because it was obvious that the creature was
not a shark; with a shark, one knew exactly what it was one had to be
afraid of. And then the cry went up: “It’s a crocodile! It’s a crocodile!”
Even the lifesavers heard it, and looked back toward the shore,
confused. Before they could get to the swimmer, he was in water
ahallow enough for him to stand, and we could see him very clearly,
his face grim and wild with water and effort, his hands locked at
round the long snout of a big reptile, which seemed to gather up the
rest of its body in an attempt to kick him, rather than to thrash at him
with its tail, as crocodiles are said to do. “A crocodile!” the cry s went
up again. “Enormous!” Men rushed into the shallow water with
pocketknives and weapons of driftwood. Yet the man staggered up
onto the beach with his monster alone. He was short, stockyman, and
it was true that the thing was as big as he was. It seemed stunned,
and he kept hitting it across the snout with his fist, as if to say, “That
will show you!” Amid the screams and the squeals, and the
confusion of lifesavers, rope, brandished driftwood, and Boy Scout
knives, he beat it to death himself; it was plain that, exhausted
though he was, he wanted the privilege of being the conqueror. Then
he sat on the sand, sniffing deeply, his chest heaving, a flask of
brandy trembling in his hand; I remember so well how he said, in an
incredulous, rasping voice, “Crocodile that size could’ve torn one of
those kids in half.”
26
The man was a great hero for half an hour. Then the old retired major
who had lived in the district for many years and was a botanist and
naturalist came over the sand, leaning ob his little cane, and prodded
at the monster lying there disfigured by blows and sand. “Leguan,”
the major said. “Old leguan. Poor old lizard wouldn’t harm a fly.
Must’ve been trying to get back to the lagoon.” Then major was quite
right. The beast was not a crocodile but one of those giant lizards, the
leguans, that are still fairly common all over South Africa but are
careful to keep out of the way of man---as timid and, indeed, except
for the frighteming size and resemblance to the crocodile family, as
defenseless as the chameleon. He would not have bitten the
swimmer, and he was too stupid and clumsy even to use his weight
to defend himself. The man had done little with most reluctant of
dragons. So, with the wiliness of human beings, who hate to admit
that they have been taken in and must turn their gullibility to
advantage somehow, the people in the village and at the hotel were
quick to make a joke of the swimmer; where before his words
“Could’ve torn one of those kids in half” had made him seem the
savior of their children, now they saw something absurd iin the
dramatic way he had struggled to bring the creature in instead of
making for the shore and his own safety. He went about the hotel for
the rest of his holiday very much alone, and a little sullen perhaps.
By the time my sister and I were in our middle teens, we had lost our
taste for solitude and the gentle wilderness. Our childhood love of
Durban returned---for different reasons, of course---and I think that
then we came to love the place for what it really is: in many ways a
fascinating city, even if rather dull and smug intellectually. One of
our chief delights at this time was our discovery of the Indian quarter
of the town, and the Indian market. We enjoyed turning away from
the pseudo-American and neo-Tudor architecture of the shopping
center and wandering down wide Grey Street, where the shops were
small and crowded together and the balconies picked out in gaudy
curlicues, and here an d there a silver minaret or cupola shone.
Among the more conventional stores, which sold men’s outfittings in
fierce competition, were shops full of gauzy, tinseled lengths for
saris, and Indian jewelers whose crammed windows seemed almost
27
to tinkle with rows and rows of long gold earrings, and pendants
strung upon thread. Those shops that were especially designed to
entice European visitors like ourselves burned incense. Their dry,
sweet odor was pleasant after the hot street, where splashes of
chewed betel nut looked like blood on the pavement. In the Indian
market there were piles of sweetmeats colored violent pink and
putrescent yellow, which smelled as revolting as they looked. We
would return from these small expeditions with a particular type of
sandal, thronged over the big toe, or a pair od earrings that looked as
if they had been stamped out of thin gold tinfoil and that hung from
the lobe to the shoulder. The sandals were called, if I remember
rightlt, chappals, and L know they were imported from India, but I do
not remember ever seeing an Indian woman in Durban wear them.
The earrings, without the folds of a sari to back them up, looked
cheap and foolish in Western ears.
Like most South Africans, once I had been to Cape Town I wondered
how I had ever thought Durban beautiful. Before I was quite grown
up, I went alone with my father to Cape Town and we took a cable
car to the top of Table Mountain. We stood there, on a clear, calm.
Perfect day, and, truly, for a little girl, that was god’s eye look at the
world. On such a day, you can see the whole Cape Peninsula, from
Fishhoek on the one side, right around the ribs of mountain rising out
of the sea, to Camps Bay on the other side. Some people even claim
that you are looking at two oceans---the Atlantic on one side and the
Indian on the other. But that is in dispute, for it is difficult to say
where one ocean begins and the other ends. Anyway, the vast waters
that kie before you are enough for two oceans. No peacock’s tail ever
showed such blues and greens as the seals do from that height; all the
gradations of depth are miraculously revealed, and lookingfar, far
down, where the color crinkles and breaks into white near the shore,
you see pale translucent areas in which the rocks show as boldly as if
you were looking through the glass bottom of a boat directly above
them.
It is something splendid, an almost superhuman experience, to see
the tip of a continent, alive, at your feet. I know that OI stumbled
28
back to the cable station that day smiling constantly at my father but
with the feeling of tears behind my eyes, in a confused state of
exaltation that made it impossible for me to speak, and because I was
so young, I immediately lost my exaltation in anger when I saw that
many people who had come up with us on the cable car had been
spending their half hour before the cable took us all down again
writing postcards that would bear the postmark “Table Mountain.”
These absorbed visitors scarcely glanced out of the windows at what
they had come to see.
For some reason, our family did not visit the Kruger National Park
until I was sixteen and in my last year at high school. Just how
unusual this abstinence is is difficult to explain to anyone who is not
South African. For whatever else the South African in general, and
the Trandvaaler in particular, may or may not do for this family, he
will manage somehow to get them to Kruger Park, the great wildlife
preserve in the Transvaal. If he has no car, he will borrow one, and if
he cannot do this, he will persuade a friend that two families can
travel as uncomfortably as one, and beg a lift. The Park opens at the
beginning of winter, in late April or early May, and by dawn on the
opening day, cars and trucks loaded with camping equipment and
tinned food are lined up in mile long queues outside the various
camps that serve as points of entry to the preserve.
I had heard so many tales and seen so many home movies about the
Kruger Park (“My dear, and then the lioness walked right up to the
car and sniffed the tires!”) that I almost dreaded going. I regarded
listlessly the prospect of overcrowded camps, boerewors (a coarse,
highly seasoned saudage held in sentimental regard by both
Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans) cooked over an
open fire, and long processions of cars crawling along the dusty
roads in the stern rivalry along the dusty roads in the stern rivalry of
who would sight the most lions soonest. But when we went, it was
very different from that. We went in October, during the last few
days before the park closes for the summer rains and the calm that is
granted the beasts for their breeding season. We stayed at a camp
with a beautiful name---Shingwedsi---and we had the shade of its
29
trees and the red blossoms of the cacti almost to ourselves. The peace
of the bushveld was scarcely disturbed by the few cars on the roads.
The rainy season was a month off, but the first night we were at
Shingwedsi the fantastic roar of a freak storm woke us at midnight
and flooded the camp, maroomimg us for nearly twenty–four hours.
During the next day, while we were shut in by drumming rain, my
Uncle Robert, our mother’s younger brother, drank beer with and
received the confidences of an engineer who lived and worked in the
Park all the year round, watching over the boreholes that guarantee
the animals’ water supply. At that period, I had just begun to read
Hemingway, and it seemed to me that for the first time in my life
something in fact had measured up to fiction. The engineer was just
such a man as poor Francis Macomber might have chosen as an
escort on a hunting trip. (And, on reflection, just such a man as Mrs.
Macomber might have wished him to choose.) He had a taciturn,
world-weary air, and, in the cozy confinement of the rain, over the
beer, he made Robert (since he was only ten years older than I, we
girls did no call Robert “uncle”) feel that he, Robert, was the first
person in years to whom he had been able to talk as he was talking,
the first man whose sporting sense and sensitivity matched the
enginner’s own, a man---at last! at last!---who instinctively would
understand the boredom and tameness, for a man of spirit, of life in a
sanctuary, with h no one to talkto but gaping tourists. In fact, the
engineer was one of those people who make others feel chosen. At
five in the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, he stood up, flexed
his tanned, muscular knees, and said, with a kind of stern, sardonic
glee, “This is the time for elephant, if you want elephant. This
water’ll keep the wardens out of my way for aday or so.”
Robert and I were agog, as we were meant to be. While Robert
questioned him, unconsciously adopting the engineer’s terse manner
as he tried to show that he “belonged,” I kept close by his side,
determined not to be left out of this. The way to see elephants, to get
right up close to them and just about feel them breathe on you as you
photographed them, said the engineer, was to take a light truck and
go after them fast, ignoring the strict twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed
30
limit in force in the preserve, and then, when you sighted them, to get
out and stalk them on foot, ignoring the still stricter rule that no
visitor may leave his car. Robert and I grinned with excitement. “But
you can only do it when those bastards are sitting with their feet in
mustard water,” said the engineer, referring to the wardens. Well,
that was now.
Robert and I slipped away from the rest of the family---I was
extremely anxious to have this adventure exclusive of my sister---and
in half an hour the engineer had Robert, me, and Robert’s movie
camera in his truck. While the wild passage of the truck through
water and mud shook loose every nerve in our bodies, he told us that
what we were going to do was perfectly safe, and then, almost in the
same breath, that what we were going to do was terribly dangerous
but that we need not worry, for he knew exactly how to do it and get
away with it. I wanted to close my eyes with the speed and
exhilaration, but the leaps of a herd of impala deer that we had
startled into a Nijinsky-like retreat of alarmed grace brought me out
of my tense passivity almost as abruptly as the deer had been
brought out of theirs. After about twenty minutes, we reached a river
bed, and there, with their great columns of legs in the newly flowing
water, stood three magnificent elephants.
The shattering life of the truck came to an abrupt halt. The engineer
said “There you are!,” and sent Robert and me stalking on foot. It
seemed as if our hush of intensity had brought home to the engineer
his boredom with his sort of adventure; he looked around for a dry
boulder where he could sit and smoke his pipe while he waited. The
truck was, I suppose, about two hundred yards from the river. When
Robert and I were very near indeed to the elephants, and the beetlewing whir of the camera was sounding, one of the great beasts slowly
swung his head erect and toward us. Then he walked out of the
shallow water, trailing his huge feet like a clumsy child, and
advanced to within thirty feet of the camera, Robert, and me. And
there the elephant stood, slowly flapping those wide, palmetto-like
ears that African elephants have. I don’t think he seemed real to us;
we thought only of the camera, and saw the elephant as he would
31
loom on the screen rather than as he was, a slack-skinned splendid
hulk, standing there before us. Then, all in the same instant, I smelled
licorice tobacco and fely myself violently grasped by the arm. The
same thing must have happened to Robert, for at once we were
jerked furiously around, met the impatient and alarmed face of the
engineer, and were running, pushed roughly along by him, for the
truck. I suppose it was the beating of my own heart that I thought
was the pounding of the elephant coming up behind us.
Driving back to Shingwedsi camp, the engineer grinned
fascinatingly---it was difficult to say who was more under the spell of
that grin, Robert or I---and remarked, “Those pictures will be quite
good enough as it is. You don’t want to scare your friends, do you?”
And Robert and I laughed, to show that we, too, knew there hadn’t
rally been any danger. It was only next day, when our party had
moved on to Pretorius Kop camp to see lions, that I suddenly
remembered that the engineer hadn’t had to start the truck when we
jumped in; he had left the engine running all the time. Some years
later, I was told that there is reason to believe that when an elephant
flaps his ears, he does it to fan the scent of his enemy more strongly
toward his nostrils, in preparation for a charge.
In a country where people of a color different from your own are
neither in the majority nor the ruling class, you may avoid altogether
certain complications that might otherwise arise in the formation of
your sense of human values. If the Chinese, say, remain a small,
exiled community in Chinatown, and the Red Indians are selfcontained on their reservation, you can grow up to have a reasonable
standard of personal ethics without taking consideration of their
presence. The problem of how you would behave toward them if you
met them can be almost purely academic; you need not meet them, if
you don’t wish to. In South Africa, this is not possible. There are
people who try it, who arrange their lives for it, but they never
succeed, for it cannot be done. Even if you are the most diehard
reactionary you cannot get away with it in a country where there are
three million white people an d nine million black and Colored.
32
For me, one of the confusing things about growing up in South Africa
was the strange shift---every year or two when I was small, and then
weekly. Daily almost, when I was adolescent---in my consciousness
of, and attitude toward, the Africans around me. I became aware of
them incredibly slowly, it now seems, as if with some faculty that
should naturally, the way the ability to focus and to recognize voices
comes to a baby in a matter of weeks after birth, have been part of my
human equipment from the beginning. The experience of the warm
black bosom of the mammy (in South Africa she would be known as
the nanny) has been so sentimentalized that I must say I am glad it is
one I missed, though not for the reason that I missed it. The reason
was simply that my mother, like many good South African mothers
from England and Europe, would not have dreamed of allowing any
child of hers to nestle in the bosom of a dirty native girl. (That was
exactly the phrase---a phrase of scornful reflection on those mothers
who did.) And if, at the age of five or six, it had been suggested to my
sister or me that we should go up and give our native servant a hug,
we would have shrunk away. We accepted the fact that natives were
not as clean as we were in the same way we accepted the fact that our
spaniel had fleas. It was not until years later that it occurred to me
that if our servants were not so well and frequently bathed as
ourselves, the circumstance that no bathroom or shower was
provided for them might have had a great deal to do with it. And it
was later even than that when the final breaking down of this
preconceived notion came about. I was a long time learning, and each
stage of enlightenment brought its own impulse of guilt for the
ignorance that had gone before.
Our successive attitudes toward the Indians is another example of the
disturbing shift in values that is likely to beset any child growing up
in South Africa. The Indians are a minority group here, but even
before their treatment became an issue at the United Nations,
affecting the attitude of the rest of the world toward South Africa,
they could not comfortably be ignored, because they belonged to the
great mass of the Other Side---the Coloreds. The Indians were
imported into country as indentured labor for the Natal sugarcane
fields in the mid-nineteenth century, and now, except for a
33
considerable number of businessmen in Natal, a few traders in nearly
every Transvaal town, and the considerable number who are
employed in hotels and restaurants, they seem to be occupied chiefly
as venders of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. In our Wast Rand mining
town, the Indian traders were concentraded in a huddle of shops in
one block, bought by them before the passage of what is known as
the Ghetto Act of 1946, which, in effect, bars them from owning or
leasing property in any but restricted, non-European areas. These
were tailor shops, or they were “bazaars” where cheap goods of all
kinds were sold, and they were the object of dislike and enmity on
the part of the white shopkeepers. In fact, a woman who was seen
coming out of an Indian bazaar with a basket of groceries
immediately earned herself a stigma: either she was low-class or, if
her husband’s position as an official of one of the gold mines pu the
level of her class beyond question, she must be stingy. “She’s so mean
she even goes to the Indians’” was the most convincing allegation of
miserliness in our time. It was bad enough to be penny-pinching, but
to stoop so low as to buy from an Indian trader in order to save!
For some reason I have never understood, it was quite respectable
and conventional to buy your fruit and vegetables from the Indians
who hawked from door to door with their big red or yellow lorries.
Our household, like most others, had its own regular hawker, who
called two or three times a week. Whatever a hawker’s name (and it
was always painted in large, elaborate lettering, a kind of fancy
compromise between Indian and English script, on his lorry, he was
invariably known as Sammy. He even called himself Sammy, rapping
at kitchen doors and announcing himself by this generic. There was a
verse, parodying the hawkers’ broken English, that children used to
chant around these lorries:
“Sammy, Sammy, what you got?
Missus, Missus, apricot.”
There were many more verses with the same rhyme scheme,
becoming more and more daring in their inclusion of what struck the
children as giggle-producing obscenities, such as “chamber pot,” and
34
a few genuine old Anglo-Saxon shockers, which they pronounced
quite calmly.
If you did not serenade the Indian with rude songs, and your mother
was a good buyer and prayer, he might had you down a peach or a
bunch of grapes from his lorry, but if you were an urchin without
family backing, he would shout and shoo you away, lest your quick
hand filch something while his back was turned. It is interesting to
me now, too, to remember how yet again the bogy of uncleanliness
came up immediately with the gift of the peach from Sammy; my
mother, too polite to offend him by saying anything, pronounced
such a warning with her eyes that I would not dare put my teeth to
that peach until I had taken it inside to be washed. Sammy had
“handled” it. Sammy was an Indian. In fact, Sammy was Not Wgite.
Heaven knows, I don’t suppose the man was clean. But why did no
one ever explain that the color had nothing to do with cleanliness?
So my sister and I began by thinking of the Indian as dirty, and a
pest, the venders whom I have described as annoying us on the beach
at Durban were the prototype. Then we thought of him as romantic;
our wanderings in the Indian market in Durban were, I su[ppose,
part of a common youthful longing for the exotic. And finally, when
we were old enough and clearheaded enough and had read enough
to have an abstract, objective notion of man, as well as a lot of
jumbled personal emotions about him, the Indian became a person
like ourselves.
I suppose it is a pity that as children we did not know what people
like to talk of as “the real Africa”---the Africa of proud black warriors
and great jungle rivers and enormous silent nights, thaty
anachronism of a country belonging to its own birds and beasts and
savages which rouses such nostalgia in the citified, neighbor-jostled
heart, and out of which a mystique has been created by writers and
film directors. The fact of the matter is that this noble paradise of “the
real Africa” is, as far as the Union of South Africa is concerned, an
anachronism. Bits of it continue to exist; if you live in Johannesburg,
you can still go to the bushveld for solitude or shooting in a few
35
hours. And bits of it have been carefully preserved, with as little of
the taint of civilization as is commensurate with the longing of the
civilized for comfort, as in the Kruger Park. But the real South Africa
was then, and is now, to be found in Johannesburg and in the brash,
thriving towns of the Witwatersrand. Everything that is happening
on the whole emergent continet can be found in microcosm here.
Here are the Bantu, in all the stages of an industrial and social
revolution---the half-naked primitive, fresh from the kraal, clutching
his blanket as he stares gazelle-eyed at the traffic; the detrabilized
worker, living in a limbo between his discarded tribal mores and the
mores of the white man’s world; the un happy black intellectual with
no outlet for his talents. And here, too, are the whites, in all the stages
of understanding and misunderstanding of this inevitable historical
process---som e afraid and resentful, some pretending it is not
happening, a few trying to help it along less painfully. A sad, con
fusing part of the world to grow up and live in. And yet exciting.
36
Chapter 2
Sophiatown
by
Trevor Huddleston
Sophiatown! How hard it is to capture and to convey the magic of
that name! Once it is a matter of putting pen to paper, all the life and
colour seem to leave it; and failing to explain its mysterious
fascination is somehow a betrayal of one’s love for the place. It is
particularly important to me to try to paint the picture that I know
and that is yet so elusive, for in a few years Sophiatown will cease to
exist. It will be, first of all, a rubble heap, destruction spreading like
some contagion through the streets (it has begun already), laying low
the houses, good and bad alike, that I have known; emptying them of
the life, the laughter, and the tears of the children---till the place is a
grey ruin lying in the sun. Then, I suppose, the factories will begin to
go up, gaunt impersonal blocks of cement, characterless and chill,
however bright the day. And in a few years men will have forgotten
that this was a living community and a very unusual one. It will have
slipped away into history, and that a fragmentary history of a
fraction of time. Perhaps it will awaken faint echoes in the memory of
some who recall that it was to Sophiatown that Kumalo came seeking
Absalom, his son. But they will never remember what I remember of
it; and I cannot put my memories on paper, or, if I do, they will only
be like the butterflies pinned, dead and lusterless, on the collector’s
board. Nevertheless, I must try.
37
Sophiatown! The name has about it a certain historical and almost
theological sound. It recalls Sancta Sophia, Holy Wisdom, and the
dreaming city where her temple is built. I have never heard of
another Sophiatown in the world, though I suppose there must be
one; it is such a euphonious name, for one thing. And, of course, it
has a history and a meaning as romantic in its way as anything
connected with the Eastern Mediterranean. As romantic but also
about as different as it could well be.
Some fifty years ago, when Johannesburg was still a mining dorp, a
planned and growing town yet small and restricted in area, a certain
Mr. Tobiansky dreamed of a European suburb in the west, on the
rocky outcrop which is shadowed by the spur known as Northcliff. It
is quite a long way from the centre of town, about four and a half
miles in fact, but not an impossible distance. It was a most attractive
site in every way, for it had “features”: it was not like the flat an
uninteresting central area of the city. It could hold its own in natural
beauty with Parktown and Houghton, soon to become the most
fashionable suburbs, and, like them, it had iron-red rock for a
foundation and for a problem in civil engineering.
Mr. Tobiansky bought a large plot of ground and named it in
gratitude and admiration after his wife, Sophia. As he pegged out the
streets he named many of them after his children: Edith and Gerty
and Bertha and Toby and Sol. So from the very beginning
Sophiatown had a homely and “family” feel about it. There was
nothing “upstage” or snobbish about those names, just as there was
nothing pretentious about the kind of houses which began to spring
up. In fact, there was nothing very planned about it either. Still the
veldt and the rock were more noticeable than the houses: the streets
ran up and down the kopje and stopped short when the kopje
became too steep. There was on one side a wide sweep of what you
might call meadowland: an empty plot of ground which provided
clay for the bricks and a good playing field for the children.
There seemed to be no reason on earth why Sophiatown should not
be as popular a suburb as Parktown itself, perhaps even more
38
popular because it was more open, higher up on the six-thousandfoot plateau which is Johannesburg. But Mr. Tobiansky had reckoned
without the Towm Council; or perhaps already that mischievous and
unpredictable voice had whispered something about the future.
Whatever it was, the Council decided that a growing town must have
sewage-disposal facilities: and it decided further that those facilities
must be in the Western Area of the young Johannesburg. The natural
and immediate consequence of this decision was the end of Mr.
Tobiansky’s dream. Sophiatown ceased to be attractive in any way to
those Europeans who wished to buy land and to build homes in the
suburbs. Mr. Tobiansky could not sell to white Johannesburg and for
a while he could not sell to anyone else.
Then once again the Town Council intervened. The First World war
brought a wave of industrialisation, and with it the need for African
labour. The only existing location, Pimville, had been planned and
planted some ten miles from the centre of the town. There was
certainly need for another location which would house the African
workers and which might be a little more conveniently sited for their
work. The Western Area was once more chosen. Sewage disposal and
a native location seemed to go together. The Western Native
Township, with accommodation for some three thousand families,
was built. A tall iron fence was erected all around it. The Africans
moved in. So, some forty years ago, began the African occupation of
the western suburbs.
As soon as location was established, Tobiansky found himself in an
area where the non-European was in the majority. There was nothing
to prevent him selling his land to Africans, coloureds, and Asiatics.
Under one of President Kruger’s laws he was perfectly safeguarded
for doing so, and as a good businessman he did the obvious thing.
The obvious thing but not the most usual in South Africa. For when
Tobiansky sold freehold properties to African purchasers, he was in
fact establishing a unique situation. He was making possible an
African---or at least a non-white-suburb in Johannesburg. He knew,
no doubt, what he was doing. He could hardly have known the far
reaching consequences of his action. For as Johannesburg expanded,
39
so did its need for African labour. Apart from the squalid slums of
Vrededorp and the distant corrugated iron location of Pimville, there
was nowhere for the people to live except the Western Native
Township and the suburbs of Sophiatown, Martindale, and Newclare
which surrounded it. Houses sprang up in Edith Street and
elsewhere: houses of all types, all sizes, all colours. They crept up
towards the rocks on top of the hill; they spread out towards the
brickfields. By 1920 or thereabouts it had become quite obvious that
here was an area which belonged by right of possession to the nonEuropean half of Johannesburg. It was not so evident at that time that
white suburbia was also spreading rapidly westwards and that it was
becoming especially the residential area of the European artisan.
Sophiatown had come to maturity, had a character and an
atmosphere of its own, and in the succeeding thirty-odd years that
character and that atmosphere deepened and became only the more
permanent. When I arrived to take as priest-in-charge of the Anglican
mission in September 1943, the place had for many years assumed
the appearance it has today. It is that which I wish d so greatly to put
into words. Yet I know I cannot succeed.
They say that Sophiatown is a slum. Strictly in terms of the Slums Act
they are absolutely correct, for the density of the population is about
twice what it should be—70,000 instead of 30,000. But the word
“slum” to describe Sophiatown is grossly misleading and especially
to people who know the slums of Europe or the United States. It
conjures up immediately a picture of tenement buildings, old and
damp, with crumbling stone and dark cellars. The Dickensian
descriptions come to mind, and the gloom and dreariness which he
could convey so vividly are there in the imagination as soon as the
world “slum” is read or recognised. In that sense Sophiatown is not
and never has been a slum. There are no tenements; there is nothing
really old; there are no dark cellars. Sometimes, looking up at
Sophiatown from the Western Native Township across the main
road, I have felt I was looking at an Italian village somewhere in
Umbria. For you do “look up” at Sophiatown, and in the evening
light, across the blue-grey haze of smoke from braziers and
chimneys, against a saffron sky, you see close-packed, red-roofed
40
little houses. You see on the farthest sky line the tall and shapely
blue-gum trees (which might be cypresses if it were really Italy). You
see, moving up and down the hilly streets, people in groups: people
with colourful clothes; people who, when you come up to them, are
cg hildren playing, dancing, and standing round the braziers. And
above it all you see the Church of Christ the King, it tower visible
north, south, east, and west, riding like a great ship at anchor upon
the grey and golden waves of the town beneath. In the evening
towards the early South African sunset there is very little of the slum
about Sophiatown. It is a human dwelling place. It is as if old Sophia
Tobiansky herself were gathering her great family about her,
watchinf over them before they slept. Essentially Sophiatown is a gay
place and, for all the occasional moments of violence and excitement,
a kidly one too. But like every other place with a character, you have
to live in it, to get the feel of its life, before you can really know it.
And in the whole of South Africa there are only a handful of white
citizens who have had that privilege.
The decision to move the Wester Areas, to destroy all the properties
built there, and to transplant the whole population to Meadowlands,
four miles farther away from the city, was taken by people who had
no firsthand knowledge of the place at all. How could they be
expected to know it, when in their wyes it represents the very
antithesis of a sound “native policy”? Freehold rights and
permanence, the building up of a living community---these things are
contrary to the whole doctrine of apartheid. They assume that the
African has a right to live in the city as well as to work in it. Such an
assumption is heresy to Dr. Verwoerd. It cannot be allowed. But what
is it that makes Sophiatown so precious? Why should we care so
much to preserve what, on any showing, is two thirds a slum area? I
have asked myself that question a thousand times as I have walked
its streets, visited its people in their homes, taken the Blessed
Sacrament to the sick and dying. I have asked it when the dust was
flying and the wind tossing the refuse about in those sordid and
overcrowded back yards, and I have asked it when, looking for
someone at night, I have stumbled in the dark across children asleep
on the floor, packed tight together beneath a table to make room for
41
others also to sleep. I have asked it when, on a blisteringly hot
December day, the sun has beaten down on the iron ceiling of a shack
and the heat has mercilessly pressed its substance upon that old, frail
creature lying on the bed. I have asked it as I lay awake at night
listening to the drunken shouts and the noisy laughter from the yard
behind the mission. In other words, I know Sophiatown at its worst:
in all weathers, under all conditions, as a slum living up to its
reputation. I still love it and believe it has a unique value. But why?
In the first place, because it is not a “location.” Part of the meaning of
white South Africa’s attitude to the African is revealed in that word
“location.” In America it generally has reference to part of the
technique of the cinema industry. A film is made “on location” in
order to give it the genuine flavour and atmosphere required by the
story. But everywhere else in the world, so far as I know, the word
just means a place, a site, a prescribed area. That is why, no doubt, it
was chosen by the European when he decided that the African must
have somewhere to live when he came to work in the towns and
cities of his own country. He could not live in a suburb. He could not
live in a village. He could not live in the residential area of the town
itself. He could only work in those places. And because he is an
abstraction---“a native”---he must have an abstraction for his home.
A location in fact, a place to be in for so long as his presence is
necessary and desirable to his European boss. A place from which to
move on when it ceases to be necessary or desirable that he should
stay.
The locations of South Africa for the most part live up to their name.
They are abstract, colourless places. Every town has one on its
outskirts. Today it is necessary by law that there should be a buffer
strip---not even a pair of football goal posts. It must mark that
tremendous and vital distinction between civilisation and barbarism
upon which the doctrine of white supremacy rests. No one of either
race may linger on that trip of land, for in that way it might become a
meeting place. It is, in exact and literal terms, a no man’s land; and it
is meant to be just that.
42
There is a noticeable and depressing similarity about all locations. It
is not only that for the most part the houses are built on massproduction lines and at the lowest cost compatible with minimum
housing standards. It is that at the same time they are sited in the
most monotonous way imaginable, as if to say: “There must be no
variety in a location. Variety is a characteristic of the human being.
His home is a reflection of that characteristic. But because the African
is a native, it is a quality which simply does not exist.” Sometimes,
with the older locations, tall iron fences were erected and give the
impression not only of a kind of imprisonment but of a fortification,
as though the location were totally alien to the life around it and had
to be defended at all costs from any contact with it. Today the buffer
strip serves the same purpose and is less expensive. So, in a location,
you have row upon row of small boxlike houses of almost identical
shape and size. Such variation as there is marks the end of one
housing contract and the beginning of another or the start, perhaps,
of some new experiment in pre-fab construction. It is never variety
for its own sake. It is a location---not a village, you must remember.
As such it is unnecessary for the streets y to be named. You simply
number the houses from one to two or ten thousand and you leave it
at that. If, later on, a few streets receive baptism, it is too late for old
habits to be broken. Mrs. Kambula lives at 6004A Orlando. Mrs.
Marite lives “in the four thousands.” It all helps to keep the idea of
abstraction alive.
The great advantage of the location is that it can be controlled. People
who come to visit their friends for the weekend must have permits
before they can set foot upon that arid, municipal turf. It is so much
easier, too, to prevent the native feeling himself a permanent resident
in our cities if nonpayment of rent is a criminal offence rather than a
civil one. The presence, in every location, of a European
superintendent with a small army of officials, black and white, and
his minicipal police, is a sound and healthy reminder that in South
Africa the African needs the white man to guide and direct his daily
life. And in the sphere of broader strategy it is also wiser to have the
native living in one large but easily recognizable camp than scattered
around the town in smaller groupings. If there is trouble in
43
Johannesburg, for instance, Orlando can be “contained” by a
comparatively small force. It is not a bad target from the air either.
And its buffer strip ensures that no European suburb will be hit by
mistake.
In the larger locations there are shops, and they are even allowed
under licence to be owned and run by Africans. All the essential
services are provided, though lighting for your house is not
necessarily regarded as essential. It is not untypical of the location
concept that in Johannesburg the largest power station in the
Southern Hemisphere stands at the gate of Orlando. It supplies
electricity to the city. Orlando is lit by candles and paraffin lights.
Churches, schools, and clinics exist in locations through the effort of
the various missionary and voluntary organizations. Municipal social
workers go about their business. Men and women live there and
make their family life a reality. But always I have the feeling (and I
am sure I am meant to have it, as are the inhabitants themselves) that
a location cannot belong to anyone except the people who control it,
the European officials who live far away in the city, that other
abstraction, “the municipality.” Always, even in considering the
better aspects of location life (and there are some, I suppose), I seem
to hear the voice of the Manager of Non-European Affairs saying: We
are going to do you good, whether you like it or not, for we alone
know what is good for you!”
Sophiatown is not a location. That is my first reason for loving it. It is
so utterly free from monotony in its siting, in its buildings, and in its
people. By a historical accident it started life as a suburb, changed its
colour at an early moment in its career, and then decided to go all out
for variety. A £3000 building jostles a row of single rooms: an
“American” barber’s shop stands next door to an African herbalist’s
store with its dried roots and dust-laden animal hides hanging in the
window. You can go into a store to buy a packet of cigarettes and be
served by a Chinaman, an Indian, or a Pakistani. You can have your
choice of doctors and clinics even, for they also are not municipally
controlled. There are churches of every denomination and of almost
every imaginable sect. There is one, for example, known as the
44
“Donkey Church,” upon whose squat, square tower there stands, in
place of the traditional weathercock, an ass. I would not know its real
origin, except that it is, I believe, a schism from the Methodist
Church. Nor do I wish to suggest any approval for schism as such:
for nothing has done so much damage to African Christianity than its
fissiparousness. But somehow or other that little donkey represents
the freedom that has existed down the years in Sophiatown, and
when I pass it I metaphorically lift my hat. It reminds me, for one
thing, of the truth that G. K. Chesterton so simply and so profoundly
taught in his poem:
The tattered outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour:
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
Basically, white South Africa has the same benign or unbenign
contempt for the African as man for the donkey. Was it not Smuts
himself who said once that “the African has the patience of the ass”?
And so Sophiatown is written off as a slum area; its values must be
those of the slum; its people must be dirty, undesirable, and, above
all, unseen. Like the donkey that stands as a symbol above their
streets, they are useful for their labour, for they are strong. But, as Dr.
Verwoed says, there is no place for them above that level in society
itself. “I keep my secret still. . . .” The secret of Sophiatown is not
only its variety, it is its hidden heroisms, or rather its unknown
heroes and heroines, its saints uncanonised and unsung. I know very
many.
In the first place, let me say it frankly, any young person who keeps
straight when the dice are loaded so heavily against him needs virtue
of a heroic quality. The overcrowded rooms of Sophiatown, wherein
45
whole families must sleep and must perform all their f human
functions as best they may, do not make morality an easy thing. The
lack of opportunity for fulfilling his personality in any productive
way does not make it easy, either, for a lad to escape the street-corner
gang and the excitement of gambling. The endless, grey vista of an
existence which is based upon poverty is not the kind of outlook
which helps to keep a boy or his girl griend alive to ultimate
standards of beauty, truth, and goodness.
Again and again, hearing confessions, I have asked myself how I
could advise these children, how warn them, how comfort them
when they have fallen. “. . . I have sinned exceedingly in thought,
word, and deed, by my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous
fault. . . . “ Have you really? No doubt the actual sin id grave enough --fornication or stealing or fighting---but what would I have done in
your place? And whose fault is it in the sight of God? And what,
anyway, can I advise?
“Don’t let yourself get into bad company. . . . Don’t be idle. . . . Find
some other interest than gambling. . . . Love? Well, it’s not so easy to
describe it. . . . it must have the quality of unselfishness. “
God forgive me! I find myself giving advice that, in those
circumstances, I know I could not follow. And yet, again and again,
those gentle men and women, those fresh, gay lads and girls try to
follow, try desperately hard to obey it, and even in their failures do
not make environment or circumstances an excuse. To keep your selfrespect when you are expected to have less than your white baas; to
keep your home neat and tidy and to dress your children in fresh
clothes; to pay for their school books regularly and to see that they
fed properly. All this against a background of overcrowding, of the
need to be up and away to work before you have time to eat your
own breakfast or to clean the room that is your home. It needs the
kind of virtue which most European Christians in South Africa have
never come within a mile of. And it is common in Sophiatown. I do
not refer just to our own church people, though naturally they are the
ones I know best and most intimately. There is in that “black spot”
46
(to use the minister’s offensive title) a great well of courage and
cheerfulness in face of adversity which has been through the years an
inspiration and a challenge to at least one Christian priest. I can shut
my eyes for a moment and see old blind Margaret tapping her way
along the street in the darkness which has been hers for many long
years. Always, half an hour before the early Mass, she will be there in
church, prostrate in prayer. Day by day I will find her spending an
hour or more before the statue of Our Lady which she has never seen,
and if I stop her in the street I will be greeted with that wonderful
smile and the lifting of her sightless eyes to my face. . . .
Or, after Mass on Sunday morning, there will be old Tryphena
Mtembu. She has spent all her years (at least all those that I have
known) ,mending sacks and inhaling cement dust into her old lungs,
so that she is never free from a fierce cough. She lives in a single dark
room and “does” for herself, although a few years ago she fell and
broke her leg and has to fight her way on to the early-morning bus
with a crutch in one gnarled and work-lined hand. Tryphena has a
wonderful flow of language, and her epithets are not always what
you might expect from a devout and faithful old lady. She is, in fact,
very much a product of the Old Kent Road, and were it not for her
broken leg I believe she would sing and dance to “Knees up, Mother
Brown” with the best of them. I also believe that her place in heaven
is assured. For how could it be otherwise with one who fronts
adversity with those twinkling and mischievous brown eyes and
defies poverty to get her down with that marvellous and undaunted
faith?
Or, again, there is Piet, who put all his money into the house in Millar
Street, where he now sits, crippled with arthritis, and hoping to die
before they come and demolish his home over his head. Old Piet, our
churchwarden for so long, who worked for over thirty years in one of
the best furniture shops in the city and was rewarded by his
employers with a pittance which would not keep him alive. Never
have I heard him complain, even when it was obvious that the
handling of great bales of material was too much for him in his old
47
age, even when it was a painful and weary journey for him to climb
the short hill to the church he loved.
It would be easy but not very interesting, I suppose, to list a score of
others of all ages and types who have lived in Sophiatown for the
better part of their lives and who by their very living have enriched
and beautified it greatly. A priest can see these things. Sometimes he
cannot find words in which to express them. But Johannesburg
knows nothing of them and can know nothing, for it does not care.
To Johannesburg, Sophiatown is a slum: a native slum at that. How
could it possibly have any human dignity about it?
But there is one feature of life in Sophiatown which everyone can
recognize---everyone who goes there, that is. It is inescapable from
the first moment when you step out of your car or stop to ask the
way from the tram stop to the mission. It does not matter much what
time of day it is either. Nor does it make a great deal of difference
who you are or what your business---provided you are not a
policeman in uniform. It is the children.
I remember the first day of my arrival there on a September morning
twelve years ago. After breakfast at the mission I was told, “There’s a
school Mass on in the church. They’d like to see you. Will you come
across?” The church is a large one by any standards. As I stood at the
back and looked towards the High Altar I could see nothing but row
upon row of black, curly heads. It seemed impossible to imagine that
there could be quite so many children---impossible, anyhow, to
imagine myself getting to know even a fraction of them. But I was
wrong on both counts. This congregation represented only about half
the children in one school. Soon, within a few weeks, I was beginning
not only to know them but to compare them mentally with other
children I had known in England. I found that I quite easily thought
of their names, their features, and their characters in the same terms
as of those who were already part of my family, part of my very life.
And the reason was not hard to discover.
48
The Sophiatown child is the friendliest creature on earth and the
most trusting. God knows why it should be so, but it is. You will be
walking across the playground and suddenly feel a tug at your sleeve
or a pressure against your knee; and then there will be a sticky hand
in yours. “hallo, Farther, hallo, Seester, how are you? Hallo, hallo,
hallo. . . .” You will come back from Johannesburg, as I have done a
thousand times, fed up and sick with weariness from that soulless
city, and immediately you are caught in a rush and scurry of feet, in
faces pressed against your car window, in arms stretching up to
reach yours whether you like it or not. You are home. Your children
are around you---ten of them, a hundred, a thousand; you belong to
them and they will never let you forget it. How, then, can you fail to
love the place where such things happen? Its dusty, dirty streets and
is slovenly shops, its sprawling and unplanned stretches of
corrugated-iron roof: its fetid and unsanitary yards? ”. . . and the
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets
thereof. . .” is a description of the heavenly Jerusalem. It is a good
one. And anyone who has lived as I have in that “slum” called
Sophiatown will recognise how swiftly, through the presence of its
children and through their unspoilt and unassailable laughter,
heaven can break in upon this old and dreary world.
I have said that Sophiatown is a gay place. It is more. It has a vitality
and an exuberance about it which belong to no other suburb in South
Africa, certainly to no white suburb. It positively sparkles with life.
Sometimes when I have been depressed by the apparent success of
the present government in selling the idea of “white supremacy,” I
have pulled myself up by thinking just for a moment or two of the
African people as I know them in Sophiatown. There is something so
robust and strong about their way of dealing with each frustration,
which is each day, that it is even laughable to think that such an idea
can endure. And in fact it is by laughter, so often, that the problems
and the sorrows are fronted and overcome. It is by that magnificent
sense of humour and by the fitness with which it is expressed that
victory is won in the daily struggle and will ultimately be won in the
struggle for true nationhood.
49
A good example of the kind of humour I have known and loved is to
be seen in Sophiatown any weekend, when the “Sophiatown
Scottish” are on the march. In the distance, on a Sunday afternoon,
you will hear the beating of a drum and the sound of a far trumpet.
Soon, at the farthest end of Victoria Road, you will see a small crowd
moving towards you and becoming a large crowd as it moves. Then,
if you are wise, you will wait, and witness the unique and heartening
sight of an all-African, all-female band dressed in tartan kilts, white
gloves, bandman’s staff, and accoutrement, swinging down the road
with marvelous gusto. Behind them will come the spectators, not
marching in step but dancing with complete abandon and,
surrounding them as always when there’s sight, a crowd of the
children, dancing, too, and singing as they dance. Somehow the
“Sophiatown Scottish” stand for so much more than a happy Sunday
afternoon. They stand for the joy and gaiety which is there, deep in
the heart of the African and ready to break out in one form or another
whenever and wherever he is at home.
Another example of the same thing I have seen very often at political
meetings, especially when European police are present to take names
and to record speeches. What could so easily, in other circumstances,
become a dangerously tense situation through the provocative and
contemptuous attitude of the authorities becomes a ridiculous and
irrelevant matter. “After all,” the Africans seem to say, “this is only
an incident, and a minor one, in our progress to freedom and to
fulfillment. Why not laugh at it, shrug it off with a song?” And so
they do.
Sophiatown! It not your physical beauty which makes you so lovable;
not that soft line of colour which sometimes seems to strike across the
greyness of your streets; not the splendour of the evening sky which
turns your drabness into gold---it is none of these things. It is your
people. Yet somehow I do not think it can be the same when you
yourself have been destroyed and your houses are just rabble and the
factories begin to go up and to smother you with their bulk and size.
Even though your people will still be here in Johannesburg, in the
wide symmetry of some location such as Meadowlands, there will
50
have been a loss immeasurable. The truth is that Sophiatown is a
community, a living organism which has grown up through the years
and which has struck its roots deep in this particular place and in this
special soil. So have I known it to be. A community with all the
ordinary problems of a community and made up of people and
families both bad and good. A community, not an abstraction, and
therefore personal and real in all its aspects. And because it is an
African community, living in a city of South Africa, it has to grow
together in a unique way. Xhosa and Mosotho, Shangaan and
Motswana, Indian and Chinese, coloured and white have all
contributed something to it. And in my opinion they have all had
something of value to contribute. The place is cosmopolitan in a real
sense and has about it that atmosphere which belongs to
cosmopolitan towns the world over. It is, in that sense, unique. The
most unlikely and unexpected things can happen there and not
appear at all unlikely or seem incongruous. So you have to be
prepared, if you live in the midst of it as a priest, for every
conceivable problem at every hour of the day or night. How, then,
can you fail to love it?
A great deal is said by sociologists and others of “the breakdown of
tribal custom” and “the disastrous impact of Western industrialism
upon the urban African.” That sentence itself is stiff with the jargon
of the race-relations textbook. But when you live in Sophiatown you
don’t see it that way at all. You see Mrs. X., who has a drunken
husband and five children to support---and what must she do? You
see Mr. Y., whose wife left him two years ago and the kids are
growing up; what is he to plan for them, can the “Father” help them?
You see young Joel, who has just left school and got a “tea-boy” job
in the city, but he longs to do his Matric, and can’t find the time or
the money or the quietness for work that he needs. You are called to
that room in Tucker Street, where Joseph is fighting for his life
against advanced t.b., and in spite of all your efforts you can’t get a
bed anywhere and you wonder---well, you wonder what it all means
within the Providence of God. And you hear that Jane has got into
trouble and the boy won’t admit his fault; and you run posthaste to
see her father before he goes out with a sjambok. . . . And then there’s
51
George, arrested for carrying dagga, and there’s Michael, whom
you’ve not seen for weeks, but you hear he’s drinking. . . . But behind
them all, behind the “problems” which come the way of every priest
in every parish in Christendom, there is that great mass of folk who
live ordinary lives in extraordinary conditions and who are the
Christian community in Sophiatown. And a more vital Christian
community it would be hard to find anywhere.
I wonder, for instance, how many parishes in England today would
have a Mass in the dark of a winter morning at half-past five and get
a congregation of twenty or thirty people? And that not just once, but
week after week? I wonder how many churches today are full on
Sunday morning at six o’clock and again at eleven? Yet this is but the
outward form of something far deeper and more profound. It is in
fact the answer to the sociologist’s question---at least it is part of the
answer. The only thing which is meeting the need for a sense of
“community,” of “belonging,” in the broken and shattered tribalism
of the town-dwelling African is the Church. It is for that reason that
these present years of crisis are of such tremendous significance. Id
the Church fails in bearing her witness on the colour question now,
she will never, in my opinion, have a second opportunity. Here in
Sophiatown over the past thirty years and more we have been
engaged in building a Christian community. It is that community
which is now being smashed to pieces in the interests of a racial
ideology. And as we watch our people’s homes being reduced to
heaps of rubble we watch also the destruction of something which
cannot be built again so easily or so fair. When Sophiatown is finally
obliterated and its people scattered, I believe that South Africa will
have lost b not only a place but an ideal.
Day that I have loved, day that I have loved,
The night is here. . . .
52
Chapter 2
House of Truth
by
Anthony Sampson
Ladies and gentlemen! Let me present to you Africa’s greatest film
star, the irresistible, incomparable, indescribable one and only--Dolly Rathebe!”
I was sitting on a hard chair in a barely-furnished room in
Sophiatown, lit by an uncertain paraffin lamp in one corner. The
dirty green walls were flaking away, showing the plaster underneath;
the only decoration was a crude four-colour calender of a reclining
blonde, advertising a Johannesburg garage, and a murky photograph
of a stern and pious African grandmother, in a heavy oval frame. In
one corner was a wobbly wardrobe, with a pile of clothes and boxes
on top of it; in another corner a few crates were stacked on each
other.
Round the room, thirty people were sitting in silence. They had been
sitting for an hour in this deep, brooding African silence, gazing in
front of them without expression or expectation. At the back were the
old people---older than Johannesburg, their eyes looking tired with
so many years of gazing. No one had tried to break the silence.
I was in a corner, the only white man, with friends on either side. I
had forgotten that I was white. Only once, when I noticed my white
hand next to a black hand, like a black note on a piano, did the
oddness strike me.
I knew many of the people in the room----Todd [Matshikiza] in the
other corner, Henry [Nxumalo] wandering outside, Can [Themba],
our host, flitting lightly round the room. I wondered if anything
53
would happen in this impassive gathering. But no one seemed
worried by the silence.
Suddenly Can, the master of the ceremonies, climbed on a chair; his
slender body was quivering with energy, as if compelled by some
electric shock. He gathered his academic gown around him, his own
Baxhelor of Arts gown from Fort Hare; and announced with
confident authority the one and only Dolly Rathebe.
The spectators stared up at him with looks of scepticism. And they
were right, for Dolly was not there. The silence was broken. “She got
bored!” “She went that-a-way!” “Go fetch her, man!” “Voetsak
[Shit]!” Can remained calm. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Rathebe
will be with us very shortly . . .”
Sure enough, just then, Dolly appeared at the doorway. She had an
instant effect on the crowd. For Dolly was the most famous African
girl in the whole continent: her face appeared on hoardings, in films,
and in Drum: she sang in white night clubs and made records which
sold all over Africa. Yet here she was, the great Dolly, our Dolly, in
the doorway of a small room in Sophiatown.
She was looking very beautiful, in her exotic way. She wore a long
black dress, low cut, her brown shoulders and head emerging like a
sculpted bust, hewn and rounded and polished from soft brown
stone. Her thick black hair, gathered round with beads, stood up
severely from her forehead; and she held herself erect on her highheeled shoes. Like a statue, with the disdain of a grande dame, poised
with an unshakeable dignity in these undignified surroundings.
She stood there, with her knowing eyes roving round the room. Then
she smiled a naughty smile, and let out a tiny high-pitched giggle,
and put her hand to her mouth in mimicked shame. She looked
quickly again round the room: no longer the statue on her pedestal,
but the warm peasant girl, unspoilt, unprotected, among her people.
“Dolly, girl!” “There’s my baby!” “Katz!” “Doll-Doll!” shouted the
crowd; and she giggled again with delight, her small rounded face
54
warm in the flickering light, her wide white teeth shining from the
dark in open friendliness. The spectators jumped up and down on
their chairs in anticipation.
She spoke quietly, three octaves lower than her giggle, seeming to
come right from the middle of her long brown body.
“Did you boys want to see me?” she giggled again, three octaves up.
Everyone shouted: “Ya!” “Sure things!” “True’s God!” “Hi, Dolly,
girl!”
Dolly walked across the room, sophisticated as a mannequin, and yet
with the simple poise and grace of a Xhosa girl walking across open
country with a pitcher full of water balanced on her head. She
whispered to Todd, who looked businesslike and serious as only
Todd could. He hummed a long note. Dolly squeaked again. Todd
hummed again. Dolly sang a pure low note, and Todd nodded with
gravity.
Dolly stepped out, her fine shoulders pulled back, her tinsel ear-rings
flashing in the light against her dark, flat ears. She stood still.
Abruptly, her face lit up, her eyes twinkled, and every limb sprang
into movement. She leant forward on her toes, heaved her breasts
forward, lifted up her arms, with her fingers tense, ready to strangle.
Her mouth opened wide, her big lips quivered, and burst into song.
She sang the Xhosa hit-tune, “Into Yam,” which had sent the Reef
locations crazy with delight. The song was about a girl who loved her
man although he was a drunkard; her words junped out with a
frenzied desperation, beating the stark rhythm which repeated itself
again and again like a broken record.
I love my thing!
Cos my man’s my thing!
Call him drink drank drunk!
He’s still my thing!
He jobs for me!
55
That you wouldn’t have thunk!
So I love my thing!
Ee Ma Yee Mo Wunk!
Instantly the stone-faced figures round the room sprang to life like
puppets lifted off their perch. Their eyes lit up and their feet beat
time, and they clapped as one man, with beat of the music: they
wailed the accompaniment which zig-zagged through the tune, or
blew imaginary trombones, or twanged non-existent guitars.
Can, still twirling his gown around him, stepped into the middle of
the floor, hopping to the rhythm like a clockwork duck: his whole
body twisted into a sharp curve; one hand curled up behind his back,
the other, tense with expression, gripped into his side. His feet jerked
as if on hot coals; his body was consumed with the rhythm, lost to the
world around him like an epileptic. His tongue slid between his
teeth, and his face was contorted in a grimace.
Twenty other bodies were now up and jiving on the floor, hopping to
and from each other, grinning and gasping in a crazy silent
conversation.
I sat in my corner, watching this mass of dancing bodies. Everything
was changed. The green peeling walls seemed insubstantial, swaying
in time with the music. Grandma in the oval frame took on a new
expression of tolerance and sympathy. The room became vast, its
sharp right-angles vague and distant. The jivers seemed not solid.
Europe was translated into Africa. Every movement, every look, had
the touch and feel of Africa. As I walked across the room in my
European way, I felt like a corpse striding out from the grave.
One old man sat in the empty chair next to me; I turned to him. “Are
you enjoying this?” He jumped up with the shock.
“It is not right, sir, do you understand, for the African people to
behave like this before a European? What will the Europeans think of
56
us?” He pronounced the “Ahfrican people” as if he were a visiting
anthropologist.
The music throbbed on, issuing mysteriously from the wobbling
bodies, steady as a record. I focused on the figures tugging and
flinging each other just near me. Behind the frenzied movements I
could detect drama. Johnny, a smooth, light-skinned African, was
jiving ecstatically with a young dark girl whose eyes followed his
everywhere, and whose small feet jerked to and fro in neat obedience
to his. But Johnny’s quick eye kept jiving to a long-haired coloured
girl, embroiled in a solemn dance with a spectacled teacher; and her
eyes were always waiting for his. Their eyes quickly met, and flicked
away, and Johnny gave a look of knowing.
A couple, hugged in a tight dance, lost to the world, suddenly, with
no word said, walked away in opposite directions to sit down. A
school principal with enormous spectacles looking disapproving at
the side, suddenly hopped up and shook his nimble legs in all
directions.
The singing stopped: not the end of a record, but the current
switched off. The jiving stopped. The clapping stopped. Everybody
separated and sat down.
Can, frozen in an apoplexy of jive, walked sedately towards me, with
a large bearded man looking like a tamed cannibal chief.
“Tony, I’d like to introduce you,” said Can with mock pomposity,
waving g his arm at the man with a beard, “to a friend of mine---we
call him the Bearded Horror---Horror for short. He’s just left Fort
Hare, and he’s working in a bookshop. He’s very interested in Bach,
and he wants to write an article for Drum.”
Horror smiled shyly, the pink inside of his lips looking pale against
the brown skin and black beard. He sat down, and we talked about
Fort Hare and customers at bookshops.
57
As we talked, as in the interval of a play, I watched people coming in
and out. Johnny, his large sensuous mouth dropping with boredom,
turned over records on top of the gramophone. Then he turned over
records on top of the gramophone. Then he turned round, caught the
eye of the Coloured girl, and ambled slowly out of the room, his
hands deep in his pockets; two minutes later, the Coloured girl rose
and went out, looking purposeful and domestic. I did not see them
again.
Henry appeared from the next room, benign and paternal, surveying
the room as if surprised that the party had continued without him.
He came up to me laughing at the continuous joke of our
relationship, and said: “Are you all right?” He went up to Todd,
slipping off his chair in the excitement of a jazz argument.
“Todd, can I have a word with you outside?” Henry whispered
importantly.
“No, man! Can’t you see I’m busy, man?” said Todd briskly, and
turned quickly back. “Shucks, Paddy, boy, but you can’t compare the
Swingsters to the Maniacs! The Maniacs are dead!”
Henry walked on magnanimously.
Can reappeared in the room, his arm round a meek bird-faced man
carrying a case. A shout of “Jazzboy!” echoed all round, in every
pitch and intonation. “Jazzboy Jazzboy, Jazzboy Jazzboy.” The little
man smiled a conjuror’s smile, opened his case, and produced a
gleaming saxophone wjile jazz fiends pranced round him, fondling
his instrument, and shouting his name like a spell. “Blow it, Jazzboy!
Show “em, Jazzboy! Let it go, Jazzboy!” He stood upright with his
proud instrument hanging from a black cord round his neck, as
confident now as a soldier in uniform, and blew a swift arpeggio,
lingering on a high shrill note which could crack the room in two.
Can, glowing with achievement, climbed again on to the chair.
58
“Ladies and gentlemen! I have the honour to present to you the
renowned famous notorious well-known star of the Metronomes,
Jazzboy!” And the word echoed again round the room.
“But before Jazzboy starts blowing,” Can shouted above the noise, “I
come to the solemn business of this evening.” Can gathered his robes.
“We have come here this evening to perform a solemn onerous duty.
We have come to christen this noble mansion.” He waved round at
the peeling walls and the shaky furniture. “Gentlemen, I have the
honour tonight to name this palace ‘The House of Truth!’”
The spectators shouted: “Truth! The House of Truth!” Can cut a
streamer and the two ends fluttered down; there was cheering and
clapping and more cries of “Truth! The House of Truth!”
I turned to P-boy, a young student sitting near me. “Why is it called
the House of Truth?”
“It’s a long story! You see, every room in Sophiatown has to have a
name. I live in the House of Commons; Johnny lives in the House of
Saints. But this place is very special, Mr. Sampson. You see, everyone
in this room is supposed to speak the truth. No bull, no yes men!
Particularly with regard to---Love!”
“Over to Jazzboy!” shouted Can.
Jazzboy’s sax shrieked jazz, and the bodies round the room were
galvanized into jive. Horror turned to me.
“Do you know what this tune is called? It’s called ‘Bambata.’ Do you
know who Bambata was?”
“No.”
“He was a Zulu king who led a rebellion against the white men. We
always call our songs after African heroes,” he added dryly.
59
“Bambata” pounded on. Jazzboy, impassive and intent, blew
tirelessly. David stood by him, possessive of his hero, staring at the
shining brass. The dramas of the jivers picked up again.
Henry performed a vertical solo jive in the corner, as if pulling down
an imaginary rope and treading soil at the same time. I noticed my
grave old man, so concerned with the dignity of the Ahfrican people,
jiving with his knees bent double, half-seas over in the middle of the
floor.
Jazzboy, his face a balloon and his eyes rolling into white, paraded
slowly round the room. David and the jivers followed him, as
solemnly as if they were following Bambata himself. Jazzboy played
in turn to the seated guests, and lingered in front of Horror and me,
bowing so that the wind shook Horror’s kinky beard, and adding
special twiddles to the bare tune in our honour.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” shouted Can, above the din. “Before we
continue any further---the toast.” And there was silence.
“To Oubass,” said Can. There was a pause, and then everyone
chanted together, in unison.
The son of a bitch
Had no right to lead
Such a dangerous life.
I remembered Oubaas well. The “old boss” was a young man of
twenty-five who seemed old and wise enough to be fifty; he had been
very much part of this gang. He had mediated in quarrels, patched
up love affairs, organized parties and kept out gangsters. He was an
intellectual, steeped in Shakespeare and with pages of poetry in his
head; but he lead the same rough life of danger of any other
Sophiatowner. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” he
would say. I had last seen him reading the Divine Comedy in his
leaking shack in Sophiatown. A month ago he had been killed in a car
crash.
60
“. . . Such a dangerous life. . . .” The solemnity lingered, and then
Jazzboy lifted up his sax again and blew a gale into it. Near me,
primly alone, was a pretty Xhosa girl, manicured and powdered to
make her face light; she looked innocent and demure. The spectacled
teacher came up to her and sat beside her. With elaborate courtesy he
opened his shining cigarette case.
“Will you have a de Reszke, Princess?”
“Thank you, but I never ever smoke a cigarette, Mr. Tshabalala.”
I turned round to Horror.
“She’s very young and sweet, isn’t she?”
“She’s the biggest little bitch in Sophiatown,” said Horror feelingly. I
saw Princess beckon to Can, who danced obediently up to her.
“Canny, boy, can I have a speak with you?”
But naturally, my Princess, I’d be delighted.”
They both walked out of the room. A minute later, Can came back
and whispered to P-boy, who was chatting gaily with two girls. Pboy laughed and threw up his hands in mock despair. He made
extravagant excuses to the two girls, and then waltzed out of the
room, his features sad.
Can sat down next to me, and we talked gravely about next month’s
Drum, shouting above blasts of noise.
“POLICE!”
It was David, shouting from the window behind us. The jazz
stopped. In the corner, someone drained his glass and put a bottle of
61
brandy under a floor-board. Can, radiating respectability, walked
slowly towards the door.
“This way, Mr. Sampson,” said David, pushing up the window. I
tried to look dignified. I reminded myself that I was here on business.
I knew that I was within the law. But I remembered that the police
disliked white men in black townships. I looked at Can, who looked
at me. He nodded.
I stumbled to the window. Everyone laughed and pushed me on, and
heaved me outside. “There goes Tony!” “You ought to be black!”
they shouted gaily.
In the darkness, David grabbed me, and pointed to a dustbin.
“I’d better go back.” He disappeared.
I crouched behind the stinking dustbin. It was very uncomfortable. I
could see the lighted room through the window; the jazz had started
again. I felt the full force of apartheid.
I found a more comfortable position; lit a cigarette, and felt that
perhaps this incident was not the final humiliation of the editor, but
his triumph. I began to have the feeling of Sophiatown, sharing this
moment of anxiety with my readers: here, in this stinking corner,
waiting for the crunch of boots and the shout of “Voetsak, man!”
watching the jazz House of Truth through the window, I had a
moment of truth. How easy to understand those short stories I read
and discarded every day, obsessed with race and violence, in singleminded bitterness. How compulsory was this floating cabin of jazz
and jive.
David appeared and shouted: “Tony!” (He usually called very
formally, Mr. Sampson) “It’s okay, they’ve gone!”
I rose and stretched my legs; we smiled at each other in silent
understanding of the situation. He opened the window, and pushed
62
me up, back to the room. Everyone looked round; somebody
shouted, “The native!” and the room laughed. Can came up to me,
beaming, and dusted my coat.
“They’ve gone?” I asked.
“Ya! And the joke is, they only came to try and bum a drink.”
I looked at my watch, and noticed with a shock that it was half past
mignight. I went up to Can.
“It’s been a great evening. Thank you.”
“Delighted. But wait till the tenth. And you whites want to get rid of
Sophiatown!”
I slipped out silently, taking a last glance at the crowded room.
Jazzboy was now lying on the floor, still blowing his sax, with jivers
all around him. The old men were still along the back, gazing in front
of them.
I walked outside into the stinking yard, past tiny shacks of
corrugated iron leaning against the brick buildings; through the
chinks in the iron I could see candlelight, and hear people talking. As
I walked through the yard I could hear familiar voices whispering
from the darkness---Princess, P-boy, Johnny, the Coloured girl. By the
gate out of road, Horror was leaning on the post, watching the gangs
of hooligans passing up and down the street.
63
Chapter 3
Into the Slums
by
Ezekiel Mphahlele
When I was about twelve I noticed something that had already begun
to take shape in that part of north-eastern Transvaal that fell under
the rule of Chief Mphahlele. The young able-bodied men were
leaving the villages to seek work in answer to the call of the city.
Vaguely I understood that Pretoria was the Mecca. At Christmas-time
they came back in dashing clothes: trousers with eide sweeping
pipes, shoes with sharp-pointed front; hats with small brims; jackets
with fish-tails, trying painfully but in vain to stretch beyond the hips
in length; striped ties; belts with iron knobs and spikes worked into
the leather; colourful handkerchiefs dangling boldly out of the
trouser pocket. They told us about the glamour of the city life, the
money (£3 a month) and the electric lights and trams and motor cars
we had never seen before and had no hope of ever seeing until we
were big enough to go to Pretoria. They brought gramaphones which
they said they had played all the way in the train. They said the thing
64
we saw in Goldstein’s general store were for chickens and not eagles
compared with those that glittered in Pretoria shop windows. For a
long long time they made us believe that there were very small
people singing inside the gramaphone. They probably believed it
themselves. At Christmas time Jeemee Roe-Jars (Jimmy Rogers), then
in fashion, yodeled plaintively from various parts of the village.
And there was a less glamorous side to all this. Wherever you went--in the fields, at village festivals, at church and every other place
where people congregated---you found mostly middle-aged women,
old women and old men. The land was not giving out much. The
Black man could work only the strip given him by the chief. The chief
had more to give out. The old men at the fire-place complained
endlessly that most of their lands had been taken away by the white
man. Old Modise pulled mucus through the nostrils and spat out of
the mouth as if to clinch the matter: ‘Our sons will go out to the city
and the chief can’t stop them. The cow is too old and it cannot give
milk any more. Are we going to beat it for it?’ And the old men
looked helpless, shaking their heads like that in the glow of the fire.
The non-Christians didn’t seem to like change. Their lands turned
into patches of sand, but their t young men kept on. “That’s the
trouble with these Christians,’ they said. ‘All they can do is go to
church and sing and run to the white man to work for him and
they’ve not the brains of a hippo to stay where their ancestors lived
and planted them.’
To Christians and non-Christians alike, what the chief couldn’t do
was impossible. The non-Christians praised him for allowing them to
keep to their way of life and the Christians praised him for having
built a big school and allowing them to have churches even although
he wasn’t a Christian.
I never dreamt that I should go back to the city, which I couldn’t
picture in my mind anyhow. We thrilled at the idea of riding a train,
my brother, sister and I, when our mother came in the middle of the
year to tell us that she had come to fetch us. Three things stick out in
65
my mind about those few days. The few days when whatever hand it
was that drove the train of my life across the trackless wilds suddenly
decided to take a capricious turn. First, my grandmother cried. I had
only seen her cry at revival services in the Methodist church house. I
knew my mother couldn’t just come in the middle of the year like
that to move a hard-hearted mother-in-law to tears with a kind of
domestic joke. Secondly, mother shook off our lousy rags and
scrubbed us clean and wrapped us up in brand-new clothes. That
couldn’t be a joke either. I overheard her to say to grandmother: ‘I
can’t change my mind, any more than I can change your son. They’re
my children and I’m taking them away.’ Thirdly, those bright lights
we found on Pietrsburg station after travelling many miles of dusty
road. I heard Jimmy Rodgers yodel. The train arrived. I was too
dazed to be happy. Too frightened to ask questions. We found
ourselves in Pretoria station the next day. In the midst of a winter’s
morning we were whisked away by a taxi-cab to Marabastad, a Black
location.
That is how a country bumpkin dived into slum life. The springboard
was Second Avenue, where my maternal grandmother lived with
Aunt Dora and three uncles, all younger than my mother. The eldest
uncle was a policeman at Witbank.
After a few days my brother, sister and I went to live with our
mother and father at Fifth Avenue. We occupied one room they had
hired.
It didn’t take long for us to notice that it wasn’t all right between our
father and mother. They were always quarelling; especially at weekends, beginning on Friday evenings. We soon discovered that the
main subject of the wrangling was money. Father was not bringing
money home. We came to know that was why our mother fetched us
from the north. I was thirteen then, my brother three years younger
and my sister five years younger.
Mother did dressmaking for an African tailor just outside town. In
the evenings she brewed beer out of corn malt to sell. The family’s
66
budget was all on her shoulders. She was hard working and tough.
She never complained about hard work. Father walked with a limp
as one leg was shorter than the other. It had been broken by a wagon
wheel in his teens. But he could cycle fast and he used to bicycle r to
work. Town was only two and a half miles away. He drank like a
sponge, especially home brewed beer which he had the tendency of
commandeering and entertaining his friends with. My mother got
very angry but couldn’t do anything about it. No pleading could
move my father. When he wanted skokiaan---brewed with yeast and
water---he went to Cape Location, where Coloured people lived, just
the other side of the Asiatic Reserve next to us. Skokiaan being much
stronger than malt beer, my father often said threateningly to my
mother: ‘I’ll go drink skokiaan for you.’ But then he was so violent by
nature that he didn’t really need something to light a fire under him.
We’d never really known Father before. And now living close to him
and seeing him at close quarters, I realized that his face was
unlikeable. Like his mother, he couldn’t laugh heartily. His facial skin
clung too close on to the bones. There was something brutal and
razor-like about the corners of his mouth; as there was about his limp
and the back of his head. He was seldom in a mood to play with us.
We kept close to our mother most of the time.
‘How long do you want this thing to go on, Moses?’
‘What, Eva?’
“Don’t pretend you don’t know I need money for food. At least you
could worry about your children’s clothes. Just look at you, drunk as
always. What are you standing up for?’
‘You don’t want to sell me your beer, so?’
‘It’s there for you if you must drink. But while you’re at it, you might
think about the bellies of others that want filling.’
My father looked vicious.
67
‘Don’t talk to me like that, damn you!’ he bellowed. My mother kept
quiet. Every gesture of his was menacing, down to the limp. We got
used to these quarrels. But we had a sixth companion in the room.
Fear.
‘I don’t want that man here again, hear?’ my father said one evening.
‘He’s your friend and you know he comes to drink.’ She told us to go
outside as she often did when she saw signs of a storm.
‘Don’t talk to me like that! Didn’t your mother teach you never to
answer back y to your husband and lord?’ we heard him say,
through the window.
‘You started, Moses.’ We looked through the window.
A crashing clap sent my mother down on her knees.
‘I’ll kill you, I tell you!’ He was going to kick her when out of
nowhere a hand held him by the scruff of the neck. It was the man
from the next door. My father’s eyes flickered in the glow of the
candlelight. Mother got up and stood in the corner. We went through
a restless slumber that night.
‘Why does Father do this to you always, Mother?’ I ventured to ask
one day.
‘I don’t know, son,’ she replied rather curtly.
‘I wish Sello’s father was my father too.’
‘Why?’
‘He plays morabaraba with his boys. Father’d never do that.’
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‘You don’t know what you’re talking, Eseki. Besides, grumbling
never takes you anywhere.’
‘I’m not grumbling.’
The matter ended. Mother was good at that kind of thing. Probably
every trickle of a thought was pain, but grumble she wouldn’t.
The tailor for whom she worked went bankrupt. She couldn’t get
another dressmaking job. Factories were very few and these didn’t
take in Black labour. So mother started to do white people’s washing.
She did some sewing at home for people in the location. She made all
our clothes---skirts, trousers, jackets, and my sister’s frocks and
aprons. And I never saw a louse on me again, and she never left my
father to go anywhere in dirty clothes.
He, on the other hand, continued to bully, grouse, roar and fume.
Mother did a brisk business in selling home brewed beer. He drank
elsewhere and came to her to ask or demand money.
‘Don’t grumble, Eva!’ he’d say when she ventured a comment.
‘I’m not going to give you my money if you play the fool with yours,
that’s what.’
‘Let’s see if you won’t, bitch.’
‘You don’t need such talk in front of the children.’
‘They’re mine, anyway.’
‘They’re mine. What do you do for them?’ Her eyes sparkled and I
knew from that day that she was going to fight like a tigress to
defend her cubs. And from that day I found myself taking sides. I
hated my father; his other children no less. Whenever he was in the
house we preferred to play outside.
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‘Eseki, Girlie, Solomon!’ We went reluctantly into the room. It was a
drunken call. He gathered us in his arms before him.
‘I---I—hic---brought you sweets, see? From town---hic.’
My mother was certainly suppressing a laugh.
‘See!’ He took out a broken packet that smelled of tobacco.
‘You give the---hic---others, Eseki, as---hic---the oldest, see!’
This time my mother laughed aloud, as only she could when she was
ticked, her strong arms and shoulders shaking with mirth. She went
off into a peal again when my father said, ‘Remember, you’re my
heir, Eseki, and don’t let anybody cheat you out of it, see!’ His
breadth smelled of strong beer as he rubbed his rough cheek against
mine.
By degrees I drew out of mother the reason why she had fetched us
from Maupaneng. He was refusing to maintain us; she had reported
him to the Native Commissioner; he advised her to fetch the
children---maybe if he lived with us we’d be a constant reminder to
him; then she was to report regularly to the Commissioner.
‘And those goats and donkeys, I bought them,’ my mother said. ‘He
would hear none of it when his mother wrote to him about donkeys
she needed for the plough. But don’t think any more about it, my
son. You’re still young and such things are still heavy for your small
shoulders.’
Sunday morning. The day when we lounged in the blankets and
silently boycotted the early rising custom. The primus stove was
purring softly with a steaming pot on. There was an enticing smell of
meat, potatoes and curry.
I was thinking of the years at Maupaneng, Pietersburg. The big dark
mountains; the fields; my playmates; Old Modise and Old Segone. I
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could see through the window that it was cloudy outside; and I hated
clouds, as I still do today; had always hated them, because they made
my soul gloomier than it was, there at Maupaneng and here in
Pretoria. In the country it spelt heavy rains. And goats are impossible
creatures to manage when it rains. The goats panicked and dashed
about madly as if a huge flea had come among them. The donkeys
simply would not move in the rain. How often I cried aloud chasing
the goats. If I caught one I belaboured the creature with a stick so that
it yelled to the heavens for help. I was sure it must understand why I
was angry. Afterwards I’d stroke it and mumble how sorry I was. I
learned that there is no domestic animal as proud as a goat, as
disdainful; it seems never to have heard about flattering the vanity of
the human heart.
Running footsteps. I was startled out of my reverie, and so was my
brother. My sister followed close behind her, and she tripped over a
strip of wood on the threshold and fell---my mother. When he
thundered in we knew he had been chasing after my mother. She
kept on her knees, clearly hurt.
‘I’ll show you who I am!’ my father said.
‘What is it with you, Moses? What are you standing up to do?’
‘Get up!’
‘I can’t---I can’t---my knee!’
‘This is the day you’re going to do what I tell you!’ He limped over to
the pot on the stove. In no time it was done. My mother screamed
with a voice I have never forgotten till this day. Hot gravy and meat
and potatoes had got into her blouse and she was trying to shake
them down.
He caught hold of her by the blouse and landed the pot in the middle
of her skull with a heavy gong sound. She struggled loose from his
grip and fled through the door, crying.
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Only then did I have the wits to go and ask for help. I came back with
Aunt Dora. An ambulance had already been and carried my mother
to hospital. The police came and arrested him. We packed our things
and went to live with grandmother in Second Avenue.
A few weeks later my mother came out of hospital, bandaged up
thickly, to appear in court against my father. I also went to court.
My mother recounted the events of the Sunday morning and all other
things she had against my father before and after. The magistrate
sentenced him to fourteen days’ imprisonment with the option of a
fine of---I forgot how much. I remember that he paid it. That was the
last time I ever saw my father, that summer of 1932. The strong smell
of burning paraffin gas from a stove often reminds me of that
Sunday.
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Chapter 4
The Pagan Woman
by
Noni Jabavu
We went to the station one morning to see off a party of relatives who
were leaving us to return to their homes.
We congregated with other people at the far end of the platform on
ground level, a good way beyond the top end of the platform which
is where the ‘Non-European’ carriages tend to halt at stations in the
Union since they were at present attached immediately behind the
engine. The authorities are always changing the position of railway
carriages of the races. Sometimes ours are at the tail end of the train,
sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the engine end, the policy
being to ensure (after the occasional derailments) that the safest part
of the train should be for Europeans---or so we Africans firmly
believed.
When the train comes in, however, you forget about this for its
arrival is quite an occasion. You enjoy going to see people off or to
catch a train yourself, or merely to go and watch and talk to travellers
even when it is the morning train, which at our village arrives at that
awkward time before breakfast.
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The morning sun, newly risen, shone with its broad African smile on
the sweeping expanse of shallow hills dotted with thorn trees, the
hill-tops looking fresh and green in the clean new sunlight. In
summer when pink and mauve and yellow flowers peep from
between the boulders making tufts of colour along the ridges, ‘the
land looks beautiful like a young girl’ as we say in Xhosa.
We watched the train approach, snaking its way along the sweeping
contours, short green grass and trees and flowers until it slid to a
standstill, in our case high above us so that we had to jerk our necks
right back to speak to the travellers hanging out of the windows.
Black and brown shining faces leant out greeting everybody known
and unknown on the ground below.
And arms of raggedly dressed labourers going to work in the towns
along the line handed out the luggage of passengers alighting from
the third-class, luggage consisting of thin suitcases or pillowcases
filled with belongings and tied with string or rope.
From the second-class windows more neatly dressed people, teachers
mostly, looked out. And Europeans hung out of their windows, necks
craned towards our part of the train as always at country stations; at
the bustling ones like Port Elizabeth or Jo’burg they do not bother,
but at rural stations it is as though Europeans are fascinated and
mesmirised by the spectacle of Africans with their great bursts of
exclamations and laughter and greetings; they gaze with set,
unsmiling faces as if this African jollity is hard to tolerate. They hang
on our every word and gesture, red-faced, tight-lipped. You
sometimes hear a guard or linesman mutter in Afrikaans, ‘Allemagtig,
what a lot of bloody Kaffirs travelling today!’ Once I heard an
African woman shout in Xhosa and laugh, ‘My, who would be a
European? Folks, these people rise up angry at everything even from
their sleep! First thing in the morning angry, always angry, they were
conceived on a twisted mat, those!’
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While we were handing our relatives their things, a pagan woman
walked up and down along the ‘Non-Europeans Only’ carriages
balancing a basket of cactus pears on her turbanned head. She was a
‘dressed’ pagan, wearing an ankle-length cotton skirt that flared out
in an immense fullness behind her not unlike the flared style of the
red ochre-smeared pagan costume she would wear as a rule. There
were many petticoats underneath this skirt, also full; and she wore an
Edwardian style cotton blouse. I could tell she was pagan by the tiny
bead circlets round each of her ankles.
The passengers began to clamour to buy prickly pears from her. ‘Give
them here, mama, what money are they?’
‘Tickey a dozen!’ she shouted back, and an exchange hurriedly
ensued amid cries and loud laments from her for she was fearful of
missing the tiny three-penny piece, the silver ‘tickey’ thrown down to
her or passed from hand to hand. It was clearly a big thing for her to
part with the fruit that she picked so laboriously and prepared; not
only must she pick, dodging the long sharp-spiked cactus leaves but
wipe each fruit clean of its own tiny, soft but devilish thorns
arranged in harmless looking furry tufts all over the peel. All that day
for a tickey a dozen. If she charged more, nobody would buy.
My Jo’burg uncle pounced on her and started to bargain, struck that
moment by the idea of buying up the entire bucketful to give these
departing relatives as umpako, provision, for their long journey north.
The train was about to pull out now, so ‘Little Father’ accelerated his
efforts to beat her price down. I wished he wouldn’t and so did all
my cousins, but we knew that being a Johannesburg man he felt it
necessary to demonstrate city smartness to these pagans and ‘country
pumpkins’, that being the punning English term town relatives call
us in the Reserves since country bumpkins grow and eat many
pumpkins!
She cried shrilly, ‘Make haste, brother, make haste. My money, I want
my money!’ handing her bucket up to the window. Many hands
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grabbed it to help her, helped my cousins empty it, then passed it
back to her anxious clutch. The station master waved his green flag,
the train whistled, its departure imminent, both making her cry out
in ringing tones, ‘Oh my God, who will pay me?’ ---a noble voice,
stentorian and musical like an actress in an Elizabethan play.
My uncle answered, ‘Hush, hush, sister-of-ours. Come witrh us. We
are of course going to pay you your ndaliso, one shilling and
sixpence.’
‘But who are with you with your “come with us”? I don’t know you.’
She appealed to strangers standing near by, at which those of them
who had finished waving farewells to their friends now turned to my
uncle and me and took it on themselves to reassure her. The matter
became everyone’s business.
“It is all right, mama, they belong here these people. Go with this man
and this girl.’
‘”Go”? Go where?’ eyes flashing. How could she trust anyone with
this ndaliso, might she not find she had braved those spikes and
thorns for nothing? She said so and explained in bell-like tones how
indaliso was the wherewithal to live for the best part of a week. ‘Not,
doubtless, to enjoy life,’ she added, telling how she was a widow
with children, ‘but to live, to exist!’ and people echoed the sentiment
on all sides, urging her all the more to go with us.
‘Pi? Where?’ in despair, and was assured by a chorus.
‘Kwa Pro. . . fe . . . sa! To Professor’s, down there through the village!’
My little Father started to walk. The train had pulled right out, the
tail end of it about to round the first wide sweeping shallow contour
of our Eastern Cape landscape. He strode out fingering his watchchain as if to show that even if he had no ready cash on him at that
time in the morning, nevertheless a well-dressed city man like
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himself possessed a watch and chain that meant resources
somewhere.
The pagan woman fell in behind my uncle and me, a few respectful
paces to one side, skirts rustling and swinging and tossing from heel
to heel as she strode holding herself so very erect, with the empty
bucket on her head.
She said, ‘What people are you, brother?’
‘Of here.’ I thought my uncle answered rather curtly, but said
nothing. We walked on, his eyes roving round the green countryside
drinking in its girl-like beauty. We passed through the village of
rondavels and square-houses, the hunger a city man feels for the
country, of which he was often telling us during this family
gathering, clearly intensifying his pace as we walked.
We went past little patches of early mauve vetch and by tufts of
yellow onion-plants. Some of the households of the village were
hedged with the red-blossomed ichakatha, others with the exquisite
pale blue plumbago shrub which we call umthi kaMaqoma, the tree of
Chief Maqoma. Some homes looked bare because the owners did not
care, but the more sensitive occupants of others had planted azaleas,
clumps of the flamboyantly feathered red and yellow Bird of
Paradise bush, bouganvillaea, geraniums. As far as the eye could see
the landscape was a typically South African one, wide expanse of
rolling shallow bare hills and in the distance a jagged blue frieze of
mountainous edge; and there were the dark forested apron-like folds,
kloofs we called them colloquially in Afrikaans, of the local Amatola
mountain range. You could see how the gritty veld was dotted with
bright yellow gazania, looking like big buttercups.
I remembered how as children on our way to school at Lovedale we
used to pick gazania petals and put them to our lips one at a time and
make kazoos of them, then eat the stalks full of sweet creamy milk.
And pagans like this woman following us, had the custom of beating
this plant, u-bendle we call it, to a pulp in order to isolate the fibres
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and make the soft stringy mass into a little public apron for baby
girls. We walked on past cactus, mauve wild scabious, yellow
mimosa, morning glory. And my uncle repeated, ‘We’re people of
here,’ his thoughts evidently on other matters. ‘Here’ was very
different from the Rand where he had lived for many years and
where, if you come from the Eastern Cape as he does, the country
seems dismal, featureless, a land worn of exploitation; its bowels,
those white and ghostly mine dumps, lie heaped on the skyline, the
barren soil marred by huge hoarding signs bearing chilly commercial
legends: ‘Such-and-such a Company, Pty’. I could understand why
today he fairly ‘feasted his eyes’ on the scene as he walked. The
woman took up his reply.
‘O-h,’ she said drawing it out in the undulating interrogative tone of
speech. ‘Of here then? Do you mean precisely, really, truly, in fact?’
‘Ah, well mandithi, let me say rather, we are of-the-Professor. He is
my elder brother.’
‘Ah!’ At last the penny dropped. She had not really heard before
when she had been told at the station how we belonged here and
now exclaimed greatly and made sure of it by asking for repetition.
My uncle gave it and added, ‘We are staying here. We came on the
errand of this Concealment of my son.’
‘Aha, now I see! Oh my God, that was a terrible thing. What badness
to happen to father Jabavu, his only son. My God, oh my God!’ She
paused, momentarily at a loss, but presently was able to continue.
‘Kanti, and yet, we too had wanted to come, brother-of-mine, to that
Concealment for those are people we know. But we are “red” you
see, pagans. This put us in a difficulty. All the same we prayed to
God to bind you all, house-of-Jili. I pray for it the more now that I see
you with my own eyes, “Let Him bind you, let Him make this heavy
cloud pass from you.” It is nothing, akukhonto, it is nothing.’
‘Thank you, thank you, sister,’ my classificatory uncle said, not
slackening his step. The three of us were walking quite fast now. But
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I saw that he too was as moved by her outburst as I was, foe he
withdrew his sharp eyes from the landscape and fixed them in the
middle distance, left his watch-chain alone and said with nthe
formality which in our language covers up grief:
‘That was nicely spoken, nicely spoken indeed, sister. The house-ofJali thanks you for those words. Truly, such words bind us at such
times. This so painful manner of passing of this son of mine, after all,
then, demonstrates a wonderful thing to us all here at home: that the
house-on-my-brother is loved even by pagans, even by such as you,’
which she at once confirmed with a tremendous reiteration, ‘But that
is so indeed, young man, it is so, brother-of-mine!’
My uncle prepared himself to reply, in Xhosa fullness, thrusting his
hands out in front of him now as he walked, as though to measure a
rectangle. He looked down on the path in front of him, watching out
for the potholes which were filled with brackish water from the
heavy rain of the night and days since the funeral.
‘Now then, do you understand this thing?’ he was saying, stretching
his outheld arms out more to loosen his sleeves. ‘Is this something
that you will understand when I explain it, friend-of-mine-who-ismuch-prized? It is this: you pagan people should come to us Christian
ones. You should come. You should have come to our son’s
Concealment, understand? You should not have felt yourselves in a
difficulty. We are one people now here in South Africa. That other
thing of old is no more, now, that idea that pagans who have not
received the Word are different people from us converts who have
received it. Oh, we are all alone! That other was a thing brought by
the missionaries, these missionaries who now live off us, themselves
forgetting The Word. We were separated into pagans and converts,
yet it is nothing, it is wrong. We are one! You see that, you
understand that thing?1 His baritone voice rang, fairly filling the
country-side as we went.
‘Yes, brother,’ she said, her skirts swishing. Yes, yes. You say so.’
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‘Eh-weh, yes indeed I say it! Now then, you and yours should also
come to us at church, often, just as you are; never mind coming only
to pray for rain when the drought has got us by the short g horns,
when even then when you come, you spoil your presence by wearing
borrowed dress---tut! Leave the dresses to the converts, I say! Dresses
mean nothing. Come in your pagan habit, and dress in it, then!
Embellish yourselves, my dear good person. Adorn yourselves, oh
adorn, dress, embellish, make yourselves beautiful, thrust your ochre
on! Pile your beads on, make everything about you speak of pride,
sister, confidence, yes pride in yourselves. For you are beautiful!
Nothing is ugly in God, not even pagan dress. Therefore wear it
proudly and hold out your chests! And then come and pray too, along
with us!’
I could see why this uncle was considered a speaker. He was a
politician, had a magnetic personality, He was a celebrated organizer
of men, gifted with a masterful voice. But I also knew, the way those
in families know these things, how he was something else also too,
not exactly celebrated, in business matters. A man of ability, of parts,
but mercurial, with the clan temperament; also, he could have been
kinder to my aunt and to other ladies. Among his virtues were
fastidious and unrelenting neatness, breath-taking poetry in
expressing himself in our language. Currently, too, he was not
drinking. I thought of the old days when he was a horseman, how he
used to gallop up to our house smiling, and we children would run
to hold his horse and water it, and he would stuff sweets into our
pockets.
He had one of those active brains, his brows almost always drawn,
countenance preoccupied as now, always hard at work as all of us
close to him knew, figuring out plans. He had the Jili initiative and
aggressiveness; we all felt a constant regret that his undeniable gifts
should so often be put to ‘these schemes of his’, as we in the family
called them, since few men are prophets in the eyes of their own
relatives, and we would cry, ‘What would become of him?’ But oh,
how we loved him for he was indeed a poet, as we put it: skilled and
delicate in language, I-ciko!
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There was a silence, broken only by the sound of our footsteps on the
grass verge of the path.
At last the woman spoke. She was calm and at peace, no longer
alarmed, flashing, crying out as she had done at the station when
afraid about her tickey and her ndaliso; all that was put to one side
and her mind was now occupied with higher things. She said, ‘After
all, our pagan dress was our first dress, when we were a NATION!’
‘Aha!’ triumphed my uncle. ‘You understand it, you see it.’
‘Indeed I see it, Jili,’ she said simply as we approached the house.
We went in by the back gate that you come to when you walk from
the station. My uncle went indoors, through the passage by the
kitchen, but calling our to her, ‘Stay here!’ So she stood by the
kniphofia and cacti in the backyard where there were already
standing groups of women, also wearing the kind of dress, the
Edwardian style full skirts and mutton-sleeved blouses that she had
borrowed.
Some of them were our house-servants, others callers who had come
to ‘exclaim’ (at our bereavement) but were too respectful to go to the
verandah at the front of the house, preferring to wait here demurely
for my father to come. They had been promised that sooner or later
he would appear at this side. The sun shone on their faces, and all
were sad, serious, as if the loss of a son had happened to them.
Presently my uncle came back with indaliso in his hand. And the
pagan woman received it in the customary way, cupping both her
hands and genuflecting a little. ‘You have helped me, brother,’ she
said; a gracious way, I thought, of thanking for what was after all her
due. ‘Let the Lord bind you all.’ And she made to move away, but
my uncle said, ‘Kanene, by the way: you said your clan name was
Makowane?’
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‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One hails me thus: “Makowane, Mathumbu, Masulelo,
Sokhela . . . “’
Before she could finish, exclamations broke out on all sides from the
people standing and seated round about. ‘Goodness! What people are
those, what clan is that, where are you from? Never heard that one
before.’
My uncle held up the palm of his hand to her. ‘Don’t go yet, stay,
sister, stay. Let me call my elder brother. I mentioned your clan to
him in asking him for the indaliso, and at once he said he would speak
with you. Say no more about your clan now, keep it for him!’ He
dashed indoors again, after a while [he] came out, this time walking
slowly, accompanying my father who held a pencil and a small sheaf
of plain white postcards covered with his handwritten notes.
My father never missed an opportunity to take down rare or unkown
clan names, or of checking those he had already collected; he had
been at this antiquarian hobby for more than thirty years.
Everyone fell back a little; a teenage boy, on his way past the group
and going to the kraal at the far end of the back enclosure, leapt aside
to pick up a battered orange box and brought it up to my father who
slowly lowered himself on to it and arranged his file of postcards in
one hand and said:
‘Kha-utsho, dade, be good enough to say, then, sister’; it was too urgent
a matter to be held up with preliminary greetings. They would follow
afterwards, as everyone knew.
The pagan woman again started the recital of her clan names, and
there were three more from where she had left off before, Magidigidi,
Mafan’avele . . . ‘ That one made us smile and start to interrupt with v
comments, for it meant ‘They-who-appear-for-no-apparent-reason’;
and when she had repetitiously explained the reason for it until she
was satisfied that we understood, there was a further little hold up
because my father repeated all of them after her and mistakenly
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chanted, ‘ . . . Sokhela, Mafan’avele, Magidigidi . . . ‘ but the woman
stopped him, protesting that he had fouled the order, he should say,
‘Sokhela, Magidigidi, Mafan’avele’, and lastly, ‘Ntlongontlongo’.
My father took great pains. At the end he carefully folded up his files
and squared them like a card-player, slipped them into his waistcoat
pocket, then addressed the entire group:
‘You see then, all of you good ladies here today, these clan names and
praise names---zifumaneka nzima! kuba abanye abazazi---are procured
with extreme difficulty! For some do not know them.’ He talked
solemnly of the passing into oblivion of our nationhood, our
traditions, our background as a people, who had travelled from the
far north, East Africa; about our Hamitic forefathers with their cattle,
always searching for grasslands, and mingling their blood with Bantu
and Hottentot and Bushman and who knows what other peoples as
they went during those unknown centuries? For decades now he had
been trying to gather up what he could of known genealogies and
praise verses, which often threw light on the journey and adventures
of their owners’ group of forebears. In his travels up and down South
Africa on educational and political missions, at public gatherings
from agricultural shows, athletic sports displays, from concerts to
religious gatherings like revival meetings, in chance encounters with
strangers on trains and buses, he had carried on enquiries until at last
he had published his findings in his book, Imbumba yama Nyama. And
he told the attentive group:
‘That book has galvanized many Xhosa readers into writing and
sending me more names, more praise verses. And now, among the
many things I am doing in my retirement from Fort Hare, I am
working on a further edition and will incorporate the masses of fresh
news I have received from people like these!’ here lifting his hand and
pointing to the pagan. Everyone looked at her as if for the first time,
and older ladies showered congratulations on her. She gave a most
engaging grin on finding herself the centre of an uplifting little scene.
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And now, the time having come, my father greeted her formally,
which gave her the opportunity to tell him, also formally, how she
and hers prayed that the Lord would bind him. My father nodded
gravely at each sentence. She spoke at length, expressing deep-seated
philosophies about Life and Death, Parenthood and the human
condition, with a grace and flow and unselfconsciousness that
dumbfounded me. My father acknowledged in simple yet moving
words, sitting in his upturned orange box, and wound up the
perorations:
‘Well, I am glad it is you, sister, who have come to say those things to
us here-at-home, even though it was truly speaking through the
prickly pears that you came. Nevertheless we now take it as if you
had been with us on that day, since you show us that it was only the
difficulty of the dress that prevented you. Would it had not. But this
brother-of-mine-here,’ pointing at him, ‘did well to bring you to me.
You have spoken to me of your progenitors, names I did not know.
But there are hints in these praise names and verses you have given
which link with some that I do know . . . ‘ And he recounted some of
the traditions which he thought were linked.
The pagan woman was all smiles now. She had quite lost herself and
forgotten daily cares as the splendour of her lineage, her i-mvelapi,
her where-from, as we say, shone in glory before her and before my
father, ‘A man who,’ as she put it to the company but indirectly
addressing him, ‘was dazzling to her and hers because of his deeds,
his fame, illustriousness, and blinding to behold now that he was in
so dark a forest (of grief).’
She told him smiling, ‘We are few left of that lineage, that house, of
few indeed, father!’ He discussed this decline and decimation with
her at some length. Then changing his tone, my father teased her by
punning on the praise name ‘Mafan’ avele’, about how, decimated
though they might be and almost vanished, yet there was that
recorded knack of her stock that it might reappear-for-no-apparentreason, which naturally wound up the interview on a note that
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everyone appreciated! And then he said, ‘Go then, Ntlongntlongo, and
the Lord go with you.’
She turned her radiant face away, in a smooth movement, that empty
bucket poised on her head, and walked away, her skirts sweeping her
heels.
Chapter 5
“Leaving for Ghana”
by
Alfred Hutchinson
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My heart sank. Futility beat on me like a high fever. And in the next
moment I was very tired. I looked at the newspaper. There was no
mistake: we were still out on bail. For a moment I argued with the
newspaper. How could we be on bail when the charge had been
withdrawn?
Once more the yoke of the trial, which had been temporarily laid off,
fell on my shoulders with added weight. The long months of the
preparatory examination at the Drill Hall. Endless witnesses. Endless
documents. Endless exhibits. Endless words. The shopkeepers, the
butchers, the teachers, the nuns . . . who had appeared in the witness
box, given evidence and gone their way. A notorious African
gangster chief, who had admitted to killing his predecessor, had
given his evidence and so had Mgubasi who had been brought out of
prison where he was serving a three-year sentence for forgery and
who had admitted under cross-examination that he had lived a life of
deception and fraud. A security officer from Kenya had talked MauMau in court; a pilot who had been shot down over Korea during the
war there had testified to communist brain-washing and
indoctrination---and we had wondered what it had to do with us.
And Professor Murray, an expert witness for the Crown, had labeled
speeches and documents as communistic, and had ended up by
labeling an article as communistic which he himself had written a
few years before. . . . They had all gone theior way and were about
the business of their lives. . . .
And then the shift of venue from the Drill Hall in Johannesburg to
the “Old Synagogue” in Pretoria. Waking up in the dark and catching
an early train from the locations to catch the “treason buses” to
Pretoria, and sitting in court. And traveling back and reaching home
at m night. Day after day.
The trial clamped down, bit into me with its harsh discipline of
poverty and anxiety and waiting. Sometimes U I had felt that we
were marooned, numbered and forgotten. That we would grow old
in the trial and become nobody’s business. And now the Crown had
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brought a Polish Roman Catholic priest, an expert on communism,
and we should have to sit through the tome of evidence he had
written. . . .
I shook my head. It was all a mistake. The newspaper was wrong.
Something definite was on the way, something telling us exactly
where we stood---that we were in fact free.
“Go now! Go!” said Hazel.
“I’m going. . . .”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I’m going, but . . .”
“We’ve waited so long. . . . Why don’t you go? There’s a tide in the
affairs of men . . . You have to go now!”
“I’m going. You know I’m going. . . . Let’s wait a few days and see.
Perhaps . . .”
“Perhaps what? The indictment’s been withdrawn, that’s what’s
important. What are you waiting for?”
“You know I’m going. You know I must. Perhaps there’ll be a
statement . . .”
“The charge has been withdrawn. Go now before they recharge you. .
. . While there’s still confusion. I know it’s the time. I feel it deep
down in me.”
Hazel stood trembling. She wrung her hands and wandered away
turning round sharply. She was almost frantic. I knew what was in
her mind: had I suddenly decided to stay after all the schemes for
going away?
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“You know I’m going,” I said. “You know it couldn’t be otherwise.”
“I’ll get the money. I’ll see if I can get more. And you must go now,
today.” The tension fell like a dress to the floor. “And then we shall
be together.”
“I haven’t got the papers. The chap didn’t turn up.”
“See him. And go! Go tomorrow then!”
For some time past we had been looking for a road out of the Union.
The ports were closed and the Special Branch kept a strict check on
the people leaving the country. A “treason suspect” had no chance
through the ordinary channels. In 1953 a body of us had left the
country by the “backdoor”. The result had been a law making it an
offence to leave the Union without a valid passport.
The road, as I saw it, lay north and overland to Ghana. It was along
the trail of the thousands of migrant miners from the Rhodesias and
Nyasaland. Vusumuzi Make, one of the sixty-one persons
discharged, had, upon being banished from his home in Everton,
slipped out of the Union dressed as a miner. It was possible that the
outlet was now guarded, but with the right papers and luck it could
still be used.
I had been trying to find the papers. I had a collection of tax receipts
from Northern Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Kenya. People said that no
papers were required for leaving the Union, others said they were.
And quite by chance I had recently stumbled across someone who
said he could supply a document for my travels north for two
pounds.
I said I was leaving for Ghana. And the African National Congress
made me a delegate to the All-African People’s Conference in Accra.
There was still ample time to reach Accra before the commencement
of the Conference on the 5th December. Ntsu Mokhehle of Basutoland
would be there and we would discuss matters together. For months I
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had been getting used to the idea of being away from my friends and
the liberation movement. But the sadness of parting fell on me.
I was leaving. I swept with the morning and evening crowds,
touching them with the tender hand of parting. I twigged the grubby
cheeks of the children playing in the sand of a location street. I almost
loved the scarred and barren mine dumps. And New Canada, with
its mine lamps futilely burning on the mine lake below the grim
tangle of the mine headgear, evoked again the fleeting feeling of
some forgotten familiar thing. And I packed them all together along
with the splendour of a high veld sunset.
I was leaving and I went to say a silent goodbye to the school where I
had been teaching and where I had first met Hazel. The children
were sitting in the corridor, in the yard, and some packed three in a
desk in the classrooms---learning. After three years the Central
Indian High School was still waging a grim battle for existence. It had
become a tradition.
The school had been started in 1955 as a protest against the Group
Areas Act. Suddenly and without warning the government had shut
down Indian high schools in the city in an attempt to force the
children to attend the school it had built at Lenasia, twenty-two miles
away. The government had argued that once the children went to
school in Lenasia the parents would follow. But the Indian
community, faced with ruin, steadily boycotted Lenasia and the
school.
Michael Harmel, the first principal, had got together a staff---the only
of its kind in the country---composed of Indians, Coloureds, Africans
and Europeans. Some of the teachers, like the principal himself,
Molly Fischer, Mervy Thandray and Duma Nokwe, before he
completed his law studies, were banned leaders of the liberation
organizations. Later they had had to resign. The Special Branch
raided the school but that was as nothing compared with the
problems of money, premises and equipment.
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Each end of the month had brought the usual flutter among the staff.
Would we get paid? And Moosajee, Michael Harmel’s successor,
wore his end-of-the-month harassed look. Sometimes there was
money; more often there was none.
The staff and the students were friends and there was a silent pact of
mutual protection. Staff members felt involved in the inter-school
scraps between our boys and the near by Johannesburg Indian High
School. Once Diza Putini, one of the teachers, was arrested for
crossing the railway lines at Braamfontein station. The students made
a collection, paid the “admission of guilt” at the police station and
returned with the imperturbable Diza. And, like the imperturbable
Diza, the students had kept calm when the police arrested him in a
classroom on a charge of inciting workers to strike during the
election stay-at-home protests.
When I was arrested at school for treason, I was marched away to
shouts of “Afrika!” from the students. And it was a great day when
some of them came to visit me at the Fort Prison where we were
locked up for two weeks. I had made many friends. Some were at the
Witwatersrand University, while others had gone to study abroad.
The student newspaper C.I.H.S. News had featured several times as
evidence in the Treason Trial.
I had got arrested and Hazel had come to the school. And during one
of the many court adjournments I had visited the school and had
found her teaching there.
But now I was leaving. In many ways the years at the Central Indian
High School had been among the best in my life. They had also been
informative years. For in South Africa the various racial groups live
like strangers.
Hazel counted the twenty pounds she had borrowed from a friend
into my hands. I counted it slowly and laid it in my wallet beside the
document. The pass described me as Alfred Phiri---a Nyasa returning
home. My contact said that I should need a permit to cross
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Portuguese territory. I could get it in Johannesburg or at Salisbury. I
wanted everything completed at the beginning.
“It will take you to Blantyre,” Hazel said, meaning the money. “I’ll
try to bring more when we meet there at the end of the month.”
“The train is at 6.45 p.m.?”
“6.45. The African chap kept calling me madam.”
Now that I was leaving I was filled with trepidation. Hazel had again
opened the map. Far in the north was Blantyre, our rendez-vous, and
the width of a continent away was Ghana, our goal. Hazel had
written to Ghana for an entry permit but Ghana had refused. She
would try again.
“Don’t let us ever lose touch. It would be a terrible thing. And don’t
forget: ‘Christmas’ means Ghana. ‘Baby well’ means everything’s
fine. ‘Baby ill’ means there’s a hitch.”
I repeated the code carefully, although I could have recited it in my
sleep. There was still length of a morning and an afternoon. My
luggage was packed. I would get the Portuguese permit and wait for
the evening.
“Goodbye, my dear.”
“Goodbye.”
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Chapter 6
“Arriving in London”
by
Todd Matshikiza
Arrival. The English Channel dressed up in the most beautiful blue
and white, the most gorgeous of satins as my family and I flew across
towards London Airport. I kissed her, the English Channel. I kissed
her each time the jet plane dipped a wing, a nose, a dive to give us a f
glimpse of great London where we were heading. I would have
kissed her long and lingering if our seats were not the ones on the
wings.
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I could have kissed the white air hostess too, in Johannesburg. The
one who called me to the desk and said, “excuse me, sir, may I show
you the seating plan. Here right across the wings are your seats with
your family. You will be comfortable. Have a good flight sir.” And
then she telephoned the Johannesburg Car Hire Company and asked
them to send a big, black Cadillac with a white chauffer to take Mr.
And Mrs. Matshikiza to the Jan Smuts Airport. Suddenly I loved this
white girl. She was dark, with long black hair that seemed to want to
be thrown around my neck in a pleasant moment. She was my
height, five foot four, and her eyes were long and black and far away
from South Africa, just like I have always wanted Continental white
women to look for me, especially as I was soon going up in the air.
She kept on saying, “Make yourself comfortable, sir.”
And I followed her wasp of a waist around the office remembering
that yesterday when I was in the same office she had said I want to
confirm my booking and this girl with you is she your wife and two
piccanins are your children? Yes your booking is here. The
passengers leave by bus from here at three tomorrow and you must
be on time. I think I said yes, missus.
I kept looking through the window to see if Reggie Rathebe was
waiting. He had sacrificed the whole day driving me in his car on
that very hurried day. Reggie drove me to Cynthia Whitbank’s
house. Cynthia is the white woman who saved the piano on which I
worked out some of the things in me. I had kept and loved my piano
in my Orlando Native Segregated barracks through the riots. She
bought my piano.
I had gone to collect the cheque and to say good-bye to her. As she
opened the front door of her big, beautiful white house to let me in I
suddenly remembered the white papers have been saying black men
visit white women in Parktown while their husbands are at work.
Before I had time to finish thinking like this, she was putting the
cheque into my breast pocket with her beautiful, elegant,
expressively talented hands, and I was drinking in her lovely,
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delicate face barely one foot from mine in the mind of someone
wanting but not daring to say good-bye, farewell, as one does on the
brink of a long journey. The buzzing in my head suddenly looked
round to see that the large wooden gate facing the front door where
we stood was looking gape wide at us. She said, “Bye-bye dear, we’ll
see you off at Jan Smuts Airport.”
Reggie revved up the car and we were off to the bank where the
woman had said, “Come tomorrow my boy, I wouldn’t serve even
King George near closing time.”
King George! But that was the land I was going to. I’d be there in a
matter of hours. I remembered during the war tinkling the piano at
the Windsor Hotel in Queenstown, South Africa. Every school
holiday time I earned some money entertaining the English Air Force
from School 47. There was a very tall sergeant who lifted me off the
piano stool at closing time to say, “Jolly good, jolly good ol’ chap. At
the end of the war you must come to England.” I told him, “I must
come there if only to see the King.”
And now after all those years through which I’d heard people say
“it’s not your King it is your King . . . “ and all the clothes of that
argument . . . my family and I were gliding smoothly over the
English Channel. I forgot about the Belgian plane and all of that
story, wandered how the English would be. I was cross with the
plane’s wings for obstructing my bird’s-eye view, but then the
Johannesburg travel agent had said the only available cabin on the
ships was on the rumbling propellers.
Raymond Pitje who had been to England by ship several times had
said, “Boy, all Natives are put on the propellers in the ship.” That
meant throwing overboard the dreams for my children of a long,
lovely, lazy holiday at sea. My wife Esmé and I said it’s just as well
because the South African Special Branch could chase a ship by
speed-boat and stop it in mid ocean in case there had been a mistake
in giving us passports! They can’t stop a plane in mid-ocean. And
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anyway we were within swimming distance of the English shore
now.
The Air hostess at London Airport called out our names. There were
letters of welcome awaiting us at the Airport.
“Mr. And Mrs. Matshikiza!” It was thoroughly astonishing, she was
pronouncing the terribly awkward, long, difficult name correctly,
with the accent properly on the second syllable. Well,
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Chapter 7
“Cauldron in Sophiatown”
by
Bloke Modisane
But I am black, because I am black I was a piece of the ugliness of
Sophiatown and a victim of the violence of white South Africa; I
became an unwilling agitator trapped in the blackness of my skin,
and because I am black I was forced to become a piece of the
decisions, a part of black resistance. I wanted to be both black and
unconcerned with the games at politics, but a non-committed African
is the same black as a committed Native. Intellectually I resisted
involvement with political parties, rejected attempts to be drawn into
political discussions, yet my physical being became a tool of the
decisions of the African National Congress. There was no choice,
during riots the police shot their rifles and sten guns at anything
which was black.
After every riot there were the usual stories that the police had been
provoked beyond human endurance, that in self-defence they had
been compelled to open fire at the rioters. I have seen people who
had been shot by the police, some I have seen just before they died;
seen the glint in their eyes, then the forced, but brave smile and then
nothing. I suppose it was brave to die like that, definitely courageous
to face police guns with stones in their hands; yet it was so futile. But
it happened every time there was a riot. My mind screamed to them
against this futility, that theirs was a useless way of dying, but how
does one tell a dying man that his death is meaningless? I have never
seen a dead policeman.
I have lived through many riots, I have looked upon death too many
times. I know the stark horror of South African riots. The police have
their excitement and are initiated into manhood; the politicians are
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provided with a few more martyrs to hang on their glib tongues, but
it is the people in the locations who know the full concentrated
meaning of the strikes which the politicians call for in their best
platform showmanship.
Such a call came forth in 1951 when the politicians called for a oneday strike on May Day; it was another of those political
adventurisms, people were instructed to stay home, away from work,
in protest against some legislation. I cannot remember which,
possibly the Suppression of Communism Act; it was somehow not
explained why I should protest, I was not a Communist, and when I
did become a part of the protest I could not explain it to myself,
except that the politicians thought I ought to. I doubt if it would have
made any difference if they had explained, but I believe a code of
etiquette ought to have been considered; if a man is asked to die he
deserves the decency of an explanation.
People died in that stay-at-home strike, laid down their lives without
question or even a promise for a better tomorrow for their children;
there still has to be a national relief fund for the families of these
martyrs, and since there is at least one such adventure a year this
fund is urgent.
The May Day riots, as I saw them, were the bloodiest on record, even
for Sophiatown. I saw it happen, could smell the pungency of death,
tasted the salt in my mouth, brushed shoulders with it and stared at
it full face, as I had seen it on the battered face of my father; but the
canvas was larger and the sight of blood and the taste of death did
not revolt me. Rather the sight and the smell filled me with maniacal
hatred for the police, something which made me understand why
oppressed peoples go on a murder rampage after a successful
revolution.
I saw the police rehearsing their roles in the drama of murder
unfolding before us; it was a cool, calculated, cold-blooded dress
rehearsal. It was around ten in the morning when it all began. The
impressive parade began in earnest in Victoria Road spreading along
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the area covering Gibson to Good Street; mounted patrols, marching
detachments and military convoys in a resplendent show of arms; it
was a magnificent sight, an august show, dazzling in military ritual.
Brass buttons and military drill never fail to draw a crowd.
We lined the street to watch, with silent awe, the spectral parade, we
did not cheer or wave flags; we stood there spell-bound, transfixed as
by a stately, slow and solemn funeral train. There was a promise of
death and we could sense the horror in that promise, and yet we
could not turn our faces aside, turn our backs to it. Then suddenly, as
if in fulfillment of that promise, an order was shouted through the
loudspeaker. The people were given three minutes to disperse, but
the people mumbled and shuffled their three minutes away.
‘Disperse the crowds!’ the order boomed through the loudspeaker,
and the South African police went into the kind of action for which
they deserve, and win, medals.
The mounted police steered their horses into the crowds, galloping
into men and women, charging into mothers with children strapped
on their backs; screaming women and children were running from
one horse and baton into another; men were collapsing under the
baton wallops, falling to the ground before the galloping horses. I
saw a mounted policeman charging in the direction of a woman
running for shelter, heard her terrified scream as she fell under the
horse, the rider almost falling off his mount from the sheer force of
the blow. He had meant to cudgel her but had missed.
I was insane with anger; I shrieked and swore, but was too petrified
with fear to move from behind the corrugated-iron fence which
girded in our yard. I stood peering over the fence, swearing and
afraid. It is inhuman to even suggest that I thought the police were
enjoying themselves, like a man at a duck shooting. There were these
two mounted contestants racing for a black figure, two polo players
swinging together at the ball, both missing the strike, their horses in
near collision; swinging the mounts round and charging again. I was
ashamed in my coma of cowardice. I wanted to step outside, and
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with my bare hands strangle each one of them in turn. But I was
afraid.
Then it happened, I mean the action which has caused the death of
many people in countless riots; it is not an act of bravery, of reckless
courage, nor definitely one of stupidity. It is an action which shows
man as a complicated set of responses capable---under normal
circumstances---of reactions within a limited range of experiences,
but beyond a certain limit of endurance of loosing control of his
rationale, shouting like Laertes:
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation:---to this point I stand,--That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged. . . .
I believe that white South Africa---to preserve its privileged
existence---is gambling on this very explosive probability, to push the
black South African beyond the endurance limit, and then under the
justification of self-defence, the preservation of law and order, and in
protection of Western civilization, to completely crush the African, to
obliterate him from the face of South Africa. They are committed to
accomplish this before the Africans can organise themselves into a
striking or a retaliatory force. This eagerness can be seen in the streets
when the bullies bait an African into a temper.
On that day in May the police succeeded in their efforts; except for a
few minor bruises, there was no real danger to them. Someone threw
a stone and it bounced off the shoulder of a mounted policeman, then
there was another, and another, until the stones seemed to drop from
out out of the fleecy, solitary clouds drifting by unconcernedly, as if
to emphasise their non-alignment. It seemed the police had not
expected to be attacked, for a moment they were open-mouthed,
withholding belief, like a bully struck by the local coward. Like clots
of sweat panic began gathering on their faces, I saw it mounting in
their ranks, the restlessness, the creeping fear. In vain they flayed
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their truncheons about, parrying the stones with the butts of their
rifles. From behind the fence I threw a stone, my single contribution,
unconcerned with its effectiveness. With it I had my say. I returned to
my post. I was encouraged to discover they were human after all; the
superman cloak had fallen off, stripped of the sense of authority.
They started running, even though their bodies may not have moved
more than three feet; it was the mind which was running. They were
holding their rifles high in the air, scampering about in a confused
retreat. They may not have been supermen, but they were not men
either; and although their mind was running, the bodies would not
follow until they had been ordered to. We were throwing stones at a
machine fitted with discipline. It was a victory for us, we had
brought out the flaw in the mechanism, the human element of fear.
It was a brief, empty victory, but it was a glorious brief moment,
almost worth dying for. The order to open fire disciplined them into
juggernauts of death; from that moment on there was no excitement,
only death. The rifles and the sten guns were crackling death, spitting
at anything which moved---anything black. The police selected their
targets at random with persistent accuracy; watching through a crack
through the corrugated iron I saw a policeman support himself
against a pillar, the muzzle of his rifle panning slowly across and
then crack. The shooting, the screaming, the dying, continued for
what seemed like the whole day, and the snap staccato of the guns
echoed from all around Sophiatown; and the smell and the decay of
death spread over the township, over the burning cinders and the
smog.
And the night spread its darkness over the darkness of those who
had died, over those who huddled behind locked doors, and the
women and the children under the beds; but it also brought an
uneasy quiet, a respite from dying, a time to count the dead and a
time to be angry. The police had retired to the Newlands Police
Station presumably for fresh supplies and a deserved rest. Too many
of us saw too much death that evening, until we were physically
exhausted by the sight of death. And in our anger we prepared and
waited for the next encounter. We laid the battleground. We smashed
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the bulbs of the electric standards, switching Sophiatown into the
darkness which made all things equal.
A small patrol was treading up Gold Street without the shaving of a
moon to light their steps, and for once it seemed God was on our
side; at least the colour of our skin served us in a way that was
purposeful. In the dark the police reacted to footsteps they could not
see in their gun sights, and we g followed the towering bravery of
their course up the street. Then we started the game of nerves. I was
in a group detailed to beat out signals on the electric standards, and
with a stone I beat out signals on the electric standards, and with a
stone I beat out signals on the electric standards, and with a stone I
beat out a rhythm signaling the concentration of our forces in Gold
Street; the group was assigned to cover the area between Good and
Tucker Street. I struck the rhythmic tattoo three times, the sound
coming from behind the police. When the patrol reached Victoria
Road the signals for attack were sounded, the sharp peals rose from
all round the police; we were shouting as the attacking Red Indians
did in the films. It was a hideous noise.
We crushed our stones, almost point-blank, at them; they were
shooting blind at imaginary targets. The shots were erratic and we
pelted them, piling on the pressure from an arsenal which we had
stockpiled in the yards all along the street. We shrieked and
screamed as the stones harassed them. Darkness had made the
contest equal; though the police were at a tactical disadvantage, they
had guns. We pelted them until we heard then running down the
street towards Main Road, and along their retreat they collided with
more stones. Some were knocked down, rising without bothering
about their police caps, others dropped their rifles which disappeared
into the yards. It made me feel good, and in a sense t restored my
masculinity, vindicating the sense of cowardice and shame which I
had felt during the day; it made all of us feel proud that we had
routed the law enforcement officers of the State. We had struck a
blow, not at the police, but against y the entire system, and I wished
that those who had died could have been looking on at our moment
of triumph, perhaps it might have filled them with a sense of
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purpose; that perhaps they did not die in vain, that although their
death did not win anything, at least they were revenged most
thoroughly for their pain.
The next morning---as the police e were conducting reprisal raids,
under the excuse of rounding up the lawless elements and searching
for dangerous weapons, in fact dragging people out of their homes
and assaulting them---the white papers carried banner-headline
stories describing the remarkable restraint of the police, who in great
danger to their person, were forced to open fire on the rioters. There
has always been a margin of difference which, because of my limited
education, I have been unable to appreciate: the police do not shoot at
the Natives, casualties arise following a clash with the police.
Reading the account of the riot in the Rand Daily Mail the next
morning made me feel a great admiration for the police, and if I had
not been directly involved in the riots I would have argued the case
for the police. It was white justification speaking out. In Sophiatown
the figure stood at eighteen Africans dead; one did not have to look
for the casualty list of the police, and even when the newspapers
reported the dangerous situation of the police being fired at by the
Natives, the police were never hit; either the police wore bullet
proofing or the Africans were using water pistols.
The leader pages of the newspapers usually carried editorials
commending the police and blaming the rioting on the lawless
element, the irresponsible tsotsis; this was all that white South
African required to satisfy its conscience, to rationalize the death of
eighteen people.
Blame it on the tsotsis, the parasitic layabouts who prey on both the
whites and the responsible law-abiding Africans; blame it on the
African National Congress, the irresponsible Communist agitators in
the Congress; blame it on those who died; blame it on the
overcrowding conditions of the slums. Then the responsible leaders
in the African National Congress, intent on demonstrating their
moderation, would dissociate themselves and the Congress from the
rioting, from the violence, disowning those who had died; the
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Congress leaders would re-emphasise: ‘Our struggle is a non-violent
one.’
When everybody has blamed it on somebody else---and the more
charitable have blamed it on history---the police would feel justified
to launch the reprisal raids; hundreds of Africans would be rounded
up on infringements of the Pass regulations and other minor
technicalities. Of course the papers will explain that the raids are a
new and vigorous police drive against u illegal firearms and illicit
brews; just routine raids aimed at protecting the Africans against the
tsotsis.
The routine raids are routine only in their consistency of vengeance
and brutality, but the hooliganism of the police is something which
never gets into the newspapers; except for the very enthusiastic and
unfortunate police constable who occasionally finds himself in court
facing an assault charge brought against him by an African. But here,
too, the free and courageous white press is---especially on the matters
of colour---more white than free and courageous; and the whiteowned black press is more yellow than black.
I have found the reprisal raids more terrifying than the actual riots.
They do not mourn at the home of a coward, says an African proverb;
I am either a coward or very careful. I have been stabbed only once,
and it was a flesh wound. I have not been hit by a police bullet nor
battered by police batons, and for someone born in Sophiatown that
is a record. It is unbelievable that I have never been arrested for any
crime or contravention of any of the thousands of Pass Regulations
for which more than a million Africans are imprisoned each year, I
suppose luck has had something to do with it, but I did spend a
week-end in a place of detention for juvenile delinquents.
There is no set prescriptions for safety in a reprisal raid; during the
reprisal raids following the ‘Stay-at-Home’ campaign of 1958, I
escaped police assault by the providence of chance. In April 1958, the
white electorate went to the polls to decide between the
uncompromising apartheid policy of the Nationalist Government
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and the watered-down segregation policy of the United Party, with
its tongue-in-cheek policy of integration. The Congress Alliance
decided on a campaign of mass withholding of African labour, a
protest against the policies of both white parties. The Congress
Alliance hoped the stay-at-home, if successful, would be a threat to
the country’s economic stability and shock the country into a
recognition of the existence and the political demands of twelve
million non-white races who are denied the vote.
The pro-United Party English press used the campaign as a bogey to
frighten the voters into returning their cancerous United Party; much
play was made of its moderate policy of integration (possible),
partnership (ultimate) and trusteeship (permanent)---eloquent
quibbles for baasskap and apartheid. The English press, the United
Party and other hopefuls actually believed this would be the effect. I
heard argument that under the United Party Government there
would be a ‘steady’ return to better black-white relations. Integration
was the new toy. Some Africanists saw in the campaign another
Communist adventure. Mr. Potlako Leballo said: ‘We are against the
campaign because it’s left-wing inspired.’ Fire-eating Joasia
Madzynya, the Alexandra Township strong man, openly defied
Albert Luthuli’s call for the branches to endorse the campaign; but in
spite of the dissensions Sophiatown responded to a greater extent
than the other areas, and therefore suffered the most.
On the first day of the stay-at-home the police were omnipresent,
armed with the routine paraphernalia, but acted---surprisingly---with
patience and restraint. Their commanding officer must have read to
them the editorial in the Sunday Times: ‘The police will earn high
praise if, by their patience and restraint, they succeed in carrying out
their duty with a minimum of force.’
The police did just that, until sunset.
By sunset the Africans who had sneaked off to work were assaulted
by pickets as they got off the buses. This grave the police the
justification they needed to throw off their ‘patience and restraint’.
104
The police interpretation of the situation was simple: These Natives
are molesting law-abiding Africans, let’s go get them. But since a lawabiding African is as black as a lawless Native, the police were liberal
in their punitive action; every Native in the streets was a Congress
agitator interfering with the rights of law-abiding Africans, so every
African on the streets was assaulted.
The police hooliganism sparked off a few minor clashes at various
points in Sophiatown; nothing serious, the casualty list was
moderate. But the following morning it was very serious. The
uniformed hooligans came in lorry loads, charging into the yards and
houses dragging out people---who because they had not gone to
work were therefore A. N. C. agirators---assaulting and throwing
them into the kwela-kwelas. It was dangerous to be taught out in the
streets, the home---man’s proverbial castle---was the most dangerous
place to be trapped in; no place was safe. By nine o’clock that
morning there was not a single man in Sophiatown; they had run into
the surrounding white areas, disappearing behind the kopie outside
Sophiatown into Linden.
I was caught in the centre of the vengeance of the police, not because
I was black and lived in Sophiatown, but because I was a working
journalist on Golden City Post. Six journalists and photographers were
assigned to cover Sophiatown for the three days of the stay-at-home,
and because the newspaper---as a matter of commercial policy--traded in battered corpses, fractured skulls, rape, murder, sex
perversions and salacious confessions, our assignment was y to bring
back photographs of the police in action. We had been trained to a
point of being disappointed if nothing dramatic happened. We
followed the police vans round Sophiatown with cameras cocked,
note books and cheap biros ready; every time the police rushed a
man was clicked our shutters and Peter Magubane, famous for his
reckless chances and outstanding photographs, abandoned the
security of the press car for greater mobility with his camera.
Understandably the police did not wish to be identified from
newspaper photographs bashing in skulls of agitators, so twice they
105
warned Peter Magubane off, shouting at us to ‘Fock off’. But we
dared not report back to the office without scoop pictures of bleeding
heads; we spent hours following the police and being warned off and
we were desperate for a d front-page picture. We decided to divide
into three parties and because I took my own photographs I was left
on my own at Ray Street. Without the protection of the press car I
rated the same as any African on the streets, which means I had to
keep a respectable distance from the police and still bring back
reasonable pictures. A reporter of the Bantu World who was alone and
on g foot was later found with his head covered with blood after
being battered by the police. I was not Peter Magubane. Nothing was
happening around Ray Street, an except for an occasional excitement
and average pictures of police jumping out of the vans and chasing
an African into a yard, it was a dead beat. After an hour of
uneventfulness I decided to move towards the bus terminus where
most of the action was concentrated. At the corner of Meyer Street the
police dropped out of the kwela-kwela to chase a man u in my
direction; there was little point in risking assault for a photograph of
a police chase, the office files are filled with them. I disappeared into
the nearest yard, c scaled a fence into Gibson Street, across the street
into another yard, over the fence into Miller and on to Tucker Street
and one more yard and fence and I was home.
There was a crucial moment when the police stormed into the yard
where I lived and discovered me reloading my camera, but before
they could pounce on me I confronted them with my press card, the
impressive police seal and the signature of the deputy commissioner
of police saved me from the storm troopers of law and order.
That evening we made a check of the hospitals, there were the usual
casualties with police gun wounds, fractured skulls and broken
limbs.
Then a rumour came through that the campaign was called off, it was
reported that the announcement had been made over the radio, that
it had been called off by Oliver Tambo; some said that the full text of
the announcement would be in the morning papers. And because it
106
came from those sources of mass communications controlled by the
whites, the signal was dismissed as white propaganda intended at
breaking the strike. The people of Sophiatown had a feeling of
distrust towards the message, but it was authentic. It had been signed
by the National Secretary of the African National Congress. The
signal had annoyed r the youth of Sophiatown who were shooting
questions at me: What right had Oliver Tambo to sign that
document? I was sympathetic with their cause. In his comfortable
home, away from the police batons and y the guns, he had arrogated
to himself the pretension to sign such a document; people were dying
in Sophiatown when he was signing that document. I supported the
view that the campaign should have been allowed to continue for the
scheduled y three days, whatever the consequences, which the A. N.
C. should have realised before calling the strike.
Another campaign had failed, yet another blot on the African’s
determination for national liberation; another failure for the same
reason the others before had failed. It was a misadventure in the
political game played by amateurs.
The same editorial in the Sunday Times of the week-end before the
campaign had stressed that ‘it will be of immense benefit to race
relations, and to the increasingly sympathetic interest which many
Europeans in commerce and industry are taking in the problems of
the urban Native workers, if it (the campaign) is conducted in a
strictly orderly manner and is brought to an end as quickly as
possible without serious incidents.’
Because of the stay-at-home campaign the Nationalist Government
imposed a ban on all meetings and gatherings at which more than ten
Natives were present; the ban remained enforced long after the
usefulness of it had passed, and was not lifted ‘as soon as possible’.
107
Chapter 8
The Cell
by
Ruth First
For the first fifty-six days of my detention in solitary I changed from
a mainly vertical cal to a mainly horizontal creature. A black iron
bedstead became my world. It was too cold to sit, so I lay extended
on the bed, trying to measure the hours, the days and the weeks, yet
108
pretending to myself that I was not. The mattress was lumpy; the
grey prison blankets were heavy as tarpaulins and smelt of mouldy
potatoes. I learned to ignore the smell and to wriggle round the
bumps in the mattress. Seen from the door the cell had been
catacomb-like, claustrophobic. Concrete-cold. Without the naked
electric bulb burning, a single yellow eye, in the centre of the ceiling,
the cell would have been totally black; the bulb illuminated the grey
dirt on the walls which were painted black two-thirds of the way up.
The remaining third of the cell wall had been white once; the dust
was a dirty film over the original surface. The window, high in the
wall above the head of the bedstead, triple thick---barred, barred
again and meshed---with sticky black soot on top of all three
protective layers, was a closing, not an opening. Three paces from the
door and I was already at the bed.
Left in that cell long enough, I feared to become one of those
colourless insects that slither under a world of flat, grey stones, away
from the sky and the sunlight, the grass and people. On the iron
bedstead it was like being closed inside a matchbox. A tight fit, lying
on my bed, I felt I should keep my arms straight at my sides in
cramped, stretched-straight orderliness. Yet the bed was my privacy,
my retreat, and could be my secret life. On the bed I felt in control I of
the cell. I did not need to survey it; I could ignore it, and concentrate
on making myself comfortable. I would sleep, as long as I liked,
without fear of interruption. I would think, without diversion. I
would wait to see e what happened, from the comfort of my bed.
Yet, not an hour after I was lodged in the cell, I found myself forced
to do what storybook prisoners do: pace the length and breadth of
the cell. Or tried, for there was not room enough to pace. The bed
took up almost the entire length of the cell, and in the space
remaining between it and the wall was a small protruding shelf. I
could not walk round the cell, I could not even cross it. To measure
its eight feet by six, I had to walk the length alongside the bed and
the shelf, and then, holding my shoe in my hand, crawl under the bed
to measure out the breadth. It seemed important to be accurate.
Someone might ask me one day---when?---the size of the cell. The
109
measuring done, I retreated to the bed. There were four main
positions to take up: back, stomach, either side, and then variations,
with legs stretched out or curled up. In a long night a shift in position
had to be as adventurous as a walk. When my knees were curled up
they lay level with a pin-scratched scrawl on the wall: ‘I am here for
murdering my baby. I’m 14 years.’ The wardresses told me they
remembered that girl. They were vague about the authors of the
other wall scribbles. ‘Magda Loves Vincent for Ever’ appeared several
times in devotedly persistent proclamation. Others conveyed the
same sentiment but with lewd words and too-graphic illustrations,
and in between the obscenities on the wall crawled the hearts and
cupid’s arrows. The women prisoners of the Sharpeville Emergency
had left their mark in the ‘Mayibuye I’Afrika’ [Let Africa Come Back]
slogan still faintly visible. It was better not to look at the concrete
walls, but even when I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the
warmth of the bed, there were other reminders of the cell. The doors
throughout the police station were heavy steel. They clanged as they
were dragged to, and the reverberation hammered through my neck
and shoulders, so that in my neck fibres I felt the echo down the
passage, up the stairs, round the rest of the double-story police
station. The doors had no inside handles and these clanging doors
without handles became, more than the barred window, more than
the concrete cell walls, the humiliating reminder of incarceration, like
the straight-jacket must be in his lucid moments to the violent u
inmate of an asylum.
Six hours n before my first view of the cell, I had come out of the
main reading-room of the University library. The project that week
was how to choose atlases in stocking a library, and in my hand was
a sheaf of newly scribbled notes:
pre-1961 atlases almost as obsolete for practical usage as a 1920
road map---evaluate frequency and thoroughness of revision,
examine speciality maps, e. g. distribution of resources and
population---look for detail plus legibility---check consistency of
scale in maps of different areas---indexes---explanations of
technical and cartographic terms, etc. etc.
110
The librarianship course was an attempt to train for a new profession.
My newest set of bans prohibited n me from writing, from compiling
any material for publication, from entering newspaper premises.
Fifteen years of journalism had come to an end. I had worked for five
publications and each had, in turn, been banned or driven out of
existence by the Nationalist Government. There was no paper left in
South Africa that would employ me, or could, without itself being an
accomplice in the contravention of ministerial orders. So I had turned
from interviewing ejected farm squatters, probing labour conditions
and wages on gold mines, reporting strikes and political campaigns,
to learning reference methods, cataloguing and classification of
books, and I was finding the shelves poor substitutes for the people
and the pace that had made up our newspaper life.
The two stiff men walked up.
‘We are from the police.’
‘Yes, I know,’
‘Come with us, please. Colonel Klindt wants to see you.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Yes.’
‘What law?’
‘Ninety Days,’ they said.
Somehow, in the library as I packed up the reference books on my
table, I managed to slip out of my handbag and under a pile of
lecture notes the note delivered to me from D. that morning. It had
suggested a new meeting-place where we could talk. The place was
‘clean’ and unknown, D. had written. He would be there for a few
days.
The two detectives ranged themselves on either side of me and we
walked out of the University grounds. An Indian student looked at
the escort and shouted: ‘Is it all right?’ I shook my head vigorously
and he made a dash in the direction of a public telephone booth:
there might be time to catch the late afternoon edition of the
newspaper, and Ninety-Day detentions were ‘news’.
111
The raid on our house lasted some hours. It was worse than the
others, of previous years. Some had been mere formalities, incidents
in the general police drive against ‘agitators’; at the end of the 1956
raid, frightening and widespread as it was, there had been the
prospect of a trial, albeit for treason. I tried to put firmly out of my
mind the faces of the children as I was driven away. Shawn had fled
into the garden so that L would not see her cry. Squashed on the
front seat beside two burly detectives, with three others of rugby
build on the back seat, I determined to show nothing of my
apprehension at the prospect of solitary confinement, and yet I lashed
myself for my carelessness. Under a pile of the New Statesman had
been a single, forgotten copy of Fighting Talk, overlooked in the last
clean-up in our house of banned publications. Possession of Fighting
Talk, which I had edited for nine years, was punishable by
imprisonment for a minimum of one year. Immediately, indefinite
confinement for interrogation was what I had to grapple with. I was
going into isolation to face a police probe, knowing that even if I held
out and they could pin no charge on me, I had convicted myself by
carelessness in not clearing my house of illegal literature: this thought
became a dragging leaden guilt from then on.
The five police roughs joked in Afrikaans on the ride that led to
Marshall Square police Station. Only once did they direct themselves
to me: ‘We know lots,’ one said. ‘We know everything. You have only
yourself to blame for this. We know. . . . ‘
It was about six in the afternoon when we reached the police station.
The largest of my escorts carried my suitcase into the ‘Europeans
Only’ entrance. As he reached the charge office doorway he looked
upwards ‘Bye-bye, blue sky,’ he said, and chuckled at his joke.
‘Ninety days,’ this Security Branch [Secret Police] man told the
policemen behind the counter.
‘Skud haar’ [Give her a good shake-up] the policeman in charge told
the wardress.
112
When we came back from her office to the charge office, all three
looked scornfully at my suitcase. ‘You can’t take this, or that, or this,’
and the clothing was piled on the counter in a prohibited heap. A set
of sheets was allowed in, a small pillow, a towel, a pair of pyjamas,
and a dressing gown. ‘Not the belt!’ the policeman barked at the
dressing gown, and the belt was hauled out from the loops. ‘No
plastic bags.’ He pounced on the cotton-wool and sprawled it on the
counter like the innards of some hygienic giant caterpillar. No pencil.
No necklace. No snail scissors. No book. The Chaterhouse of Parma
joined bottles of contraband brandy and dagga [marijuana] in the
police store-room.
I had been in the women’s cells of Marshall Square once before, at the
start of the 1956 Treason Trial, but the geography of the station was
still bewildering. The corridors and court-yards we passed through
were deserted. The murky passage led into a murkier cell. The cell
door banged shut, and two more after it. There was only the bed to
move towards.
What did They know? Had someone talked? Would their questions
give me any clue? How could I parry the interrogation sessions to
find out what I wanted to know, without giving them the impression
that I was resolutely determined to tell them nothing? If I was
truculent and delivered a flat refusal to talk to them at the very first
session, they would try no questions at all, and I would glean nothing
of the nature of their inquiry. I had to find a way not to answer
questions, but without saying explicitly to my interrogators, ‘I won’t
tell you anything’.
Calm but sleepless, I lay for hours on my bed, moving my spine and
legs round the bumps on the mattress, and trying to plan for my first
interrogation session. Would I be able to tell from the first questions
whether they knew I had been at Rivonia? * Had I been taken in on
One month before my arrest, in July 1963, Security Police arrested Nelson
Mandela and other political leaders in a raid on a house in the Johannesburg
*
113
general suspicion of having been too long in the Congress movement,
on freedom newspapers, mixing with Mandela and Sisulu, Kathrada
and Govan Mbeki, who had been arrested at Rivonia, not to know
something? Was it that the Security Branch was beside itself with
rage that Joe had left the country---by coincidence one month before
the fateful raid on Rivonia? Was I expected to throw light on why Joe
had gone, on where he had gone? Had I been tailed to an illegal
meeting? Had the police tumbled on documents typed on my
typewriter, in a place where other revealing material had been
found?
Or was I being held by the Security Branch not for interrogation at
all, but because police investigations had led to me and I was being
held in preparation for prosecution and to prevent me from getting
away before the police were d ready to swoop with a charge? At the
first interrogation session, I decided, I would insist on saying nothing
until I knew whether a charge was to be preferred against me. If I
were asked whether I was willing to answer questions, I would say
that I could not possibly know until I was given a warning about any
impending prosecution. The Ninety-Day Law could be all things to
all police. It could be used to extort confessions from a prisoner, and
even if the confession could not---at the state of the law then---be
used in court, it would be reassurance to the Security Branch that its
suspicions were confirmed, and a signal to proceed with a charge.
My knowledge of the law was hazy, culled from years as a lawyer’s
wife only, and from my own experience of the police as a political
organizer and journalist. Persons under arrest were entitled to the
help of a lawyer in facing police questioning. If they would permit
me no legal aid, I would tell them, whenever they came, that I would
have to do the best I could helping myself. So I could not possibly
answer any questions till I knew if the police were in the process of
suburb of Rivonia. That house was used as the underground headquarters of the
freedom struggle headed by the African National Congress. In what
subsequently became known as the Rivonia Trial, Mandela and his associates
were sentenced to terms of life imprisonment for directing sabotage and
planning the armed overthrow of the South African Government.
114
collecting evidence against me. Nor, for that matter , I decided to tell
them, would I say that I would not answer questions. After all, how
did I know that, until I knew what the questions were. If they wou8ld
tell me the questions I would be able be in a better position to know
what I would do. This cat-and-mouse game could go on for a limited
period, I knew, but it was worth playing until I found out how the
interrogation sessions were conducted, and whether there was any
possibility that I might learn something of the state of police
information. If they tired of the game, or saw through it---and this
should not be difficult---I had lost nothing. Time was on their side
anyway. If they showed their hand and revealed by intention or
accident what they knew about my activities, I would have told them
nothing, and I would be doubly warned to admit nothing. If fairly
soon I was to be taken to court I would consider then, with the help
of a lawyer, I hoped, the weight of the evidence against me. There
was just a chance they might let slip some information, and even a
chance---though it seemed remote the first night in the cell---that I
might be able to pass it on to the Outside, to warn those still free.
As I dropped off to sleep the remembrance of that copy of Fighting
Talk rose again. If the best happened I would be released because
there was no evidence against me . . . and I would have withstood the
pressure to answer questions . . . but I would be brought to court and
taken into prison for having one copy of a magazine behind the
bottom shelf of a bookcase. How untidy! It would not make
impressive reading in a news report.
I slept only to wake again. My ears knocked with the noise of a police
station in operation. The cell was abandoned in isolation, yet
suspended in a cacophony of noise. I lay in the midst of clamour but
could d see nothing. Accelerators raced, exhaust pipes roared, car
doors banged, there were clipped shouted commands of authority.
And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience. It was
Friday night, police raid night. Pickup vans and kwela-kwelas *,
The African name for pick- up vans. ‘Kwela’ means ‘jump’, and this is the
instruction that police shout at arrested Africans.
*
115
policemen in uniform, detectives in plain clothes were combing
locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens [households that sold
alcohol] to clean the city of ‘crime’, and the doors of Marshall Square
stood wide open to receive the haul of the dragnet.
Suddenly the noise came from the other side of the bed. Doors
leading to other doors were opened, then one only feet away from
mine, and I had for a neighbour, across the corridor, an unseen
disembodied creature who swore like a crow with delirium tremens.
‘Water, water. Ek wil water kry. For the love of God, give me water.’
A violent retching, more shrieks for water, water. I caught the
alcoholic parch and longed for water.
Twice again I was jerked awake by the rattle of doors to find the
wardress standing in my doorway. She was on inspection, doing a
routine count of the prisoners, ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ she asked.
Suddenly the door rattled open and a new wardress stared in. A tin
dish appeared, on it a hard-boiled egg, two doorsteps of bread, and
coffee in a jam-tin mug. Minutes later the crow was retreating down
the passage. The wardress led me out of my cell, past a second
solitary one, into the large dormitory cell which was divided by a
half-wall from a cold water basin and a lavatory without a seat. I
washed in cold-water basin and half a bucket of hot, put on my
pyjamas and dressing-gown, was led out again into my little cell, and
climbed back into bed. My first day in the police station had begun.
I felt ill-equipped, tearful. I had no clothes. No daily dose of gland
tablets (for a thyroid deficiency). My confiscated red suitcase,
carefully packed from the accumulated experience of so many of us
who had been arrested before, was the only thing, apart from me,
that belonged at home, and in the suitcase were the comforts that
could help me dismiss police station uniformity and a squalor. I sat
cross-legged on the bed, huddled against the cold, hang-dog sorry for
myself.
116
The door clanged open and a lopsided gnome-like man said he was
the Station Commandant. ‘Any complaints?’ he asked. This was the
formula of the daily inspection rounds. I took the invitation. I
objected to being locked up without charge, without trial, in solitary.
The Commandant made it clear by his wooden silence that I was
talking to the wrong man. The catalogue of complaints was for the
record, I had decided. I would allow no prison or police official to get
the impression that I accepted my detention. But the end of the recital
that first morning tailed off on a plaintive note . . . ‘and I’ve got none
of my things . . . I want my suitcase, my clothes, my medicine. . . . ‘
‘Where’s her suitcase?’ the Commandant demanded of the wardress,
who passed the query on to the cell warder.
‘Bring it. All of it. Every single thing.’
The cell warder went off at the double. Red suitcase appeared in the
doorway, tied up with pink tape. The Station Commandant started to
finger through it, then recoiled when he touched the underwear.
‘She can have the lot’ he said.
The wardress, peering over his sloped left shoulder at the cosmetics,
said shrilly: ‘She can’y have bottles. . . . The bottles . . . we can’t have
bottles in the cells.’
The Commandant rounded on her. One person would make the
decisions, he told her. He had decided.
The cell warder retrieved the pink tape and the suitcase stayed
behind the cell. Nestling in it were an eyebrow tweezer, a hand
mirror, a needle and cotton, my wrist-watch, all prohibited articles.
And glass bottles, whose presence made the wardress more nervous
than any other imagined contravention of the regulations, for it was a
strict rule that nothing of glass should be allowed in the cells. I was
later to find out why.
117
Throughout my stay in Marshall Square my suitcase was the
difference between me and the casual prisoners. I lived in the cells;
they were in transit. I had equipment, reserves. Their lipsticks were
taken from them, and their combs, to be restored only when they
were g fetched to appear before a magistrate in court. The casuals
were booked in from the police van in the clothes they had worn
when arrested, and if they wanted a clean blouse they had to plead
with the wardress to get the cell warder to telephone a relative. I
could go to my suitcase. I had supplies. I was a long-termer in the
cells.
There was a curious comfort about the first day. I had won my battle
for the suitcase. I had made up my mind how I would try handling
the Security Branch. Aloneness and idleness would be an unutterably
prolonged bore, but it was early to worry about that, and for as long
as I could, I would draw satisfaction from the time I had, at last, to
think! Uninterruptedly, undistracted by the commands of daily living
and working. The wardress on the afternoon shift seemed surprised I
was taking it so quietly. ‘You’re catching up on your sleep,’ she said.
‘But soon the time will drag.’
I tried to translate noises into police station geography. There were
three separate sets of rattlings before the wardress stood in my open
doorway: there was a door that seemed to lead from the main part of
the police station into the women’s cells; about eight paces after that
there was a door dividing the women’s cells from a courtyard; and
then there was my cell door. When I heard the first rattle of keys I
could expect another two and the lapse of about fourteen paces
before I lay in police view. Unless I was fast asleep I could not be
pounced upon without warning. However quietly the wardress put
the keys in the locks she could not hide her entry. The keys were too
massive, the locks too stiff, the steel too s ringing-loud. When I saw it
I was transfixed by the largest of the keys, the one that opened the
first door. Four and a half inches long, yet when I heard its rattle in
the lock it seemed to grow in my mind’s eye to the size of a poker.
118
The electric light burned constantly, day and night, but I could tell by
the new wardress when it was a new night shift. As on the previous
night I rehearsed again the imaginary first confrontation with the
Security Branch. I was warming to my role in the encounter and was
becoming master of the ambiguous and evasive reply to the
questions I invented for my unseen interrogators.
I pushed out of my head a jumble of ideas and thoughts of people,
with a deliberate resolve to think slowly, about one thing at a time,
and to store up as much as I could for future days and nights. I
postponed thinking about how I would try to pass the time. That, too,
would be a subject for future hours. This was a time of emergency,
and called for strict rationing.
I dropped off to sleep. There were the nightly inspections, the noisy
intake of two drunks.
Right overheard, as though someone in the cell above had measured
the spot where my head lay, a bottle broke sharply, and splintered on
the concrete floor.
The next day was Sunday, but pandemonium. The cell door was
flung open and the wardress, the cell warder, and a third policeman
stared in, disbelievingly, I thought. There was prolonged shouting
from the guts of the station, repeated banging of doors overhead. The
Station Commandant had the door flung open a half-hour before the
usual inspection. He said the usual ‘Any complaints?’ formula but
was out of the cell before he could reply to my ‘What about exercise?’
The wardresses were tight-lipped, on edge. A fever seemed to rage in
the working part of the police station, and the raised temperature
flowed out to the prisoners lying in their cells.
There were four instead of two inspections that night. Trying to
reconstruct the noises of the night hours I realized that there must
have been an admission into the women’s cells, and someone was in
the cell opposite me, for there were two mugs of coffee in the hands
of the morning shift wardress.
119
Unexpectedly a high fastidious voice said ‘I am due to menstruate,
wardress, how do I get some cotton-wool?’
‘Anne-Marie!’ I shouted. ‘Anne-Marie . . . you here! Wardress, I’ve got
cotton-wool.’
The cell doors opened long enough for me to pass out the cottonwool and to catch a glimpse of Anne-Marie Wolpe---wife of our good
friend Harold---haggard and drawn, perched on her high bed.
If Anne-Marie had been taken, Harold must have got safely away.
The escape had come off, I decided. Thirty six hours before I had
gone into Marshall Square a breakout of the cells was being planned .
..
Lying on his stomach on the floor of the upstairs Ninety-Day detainee Chiba
had caught a fleeting glimpse of shapes and sizes under the crack in his door.
‘Who’s got ginger hair?’ he called to Arthur Goldreich, who had played the
role of flamboyant artist turned country squire by living in the Rivonia
house and providing the front for the secret political work that went on in
the outbuildings.
It was Harold Wolpe, brought in between policemen, in his red dyed hair
and beard, caught at the Bechuanaland border where his escape bid had
floundered, and locked up in Marshall Square with nightmarish fears over
fingerprints and typewriters and sheets of paper in his handwriting.
‘What’ve you done about an escape?’ Harold asked Arthur in their first
stolen conversation.
The two of them, and Indian Youth Congress activists Jassat and Moise
Moolla next door, used visits to the bathroom to haul themselves to the bars
of the high w. c. window and count bricks to estimate the drop from the roof
to wall, to the thick netting over the quadrangle of the women’s jail, and
down to the ground outside. Messages were smuggled out, and hacksaw
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blades smuggled in. Sawing sessions were conducted under cover of loud
whistling and repeated pullings of the lavatory chain. Three minutes of
sawing and the blades were blunt on the bars of tempered prison steel.
Hacksaw blades continued to be inveigled into the cells, blades of every shape
and size, the sawing continued, but the bars stood firm. It was young Mosie,
with his charm, whom the young warder could not resist, and when Mosie
broached the matter of an escape the policeman said he would cooperate as
long as it would not appear that he had been an accomplice.
‘No four men can overpower me, I’m as strong as a lion,’ the warder said, so
Arthur was instructed to practice blows with an iron bar and, all escape day,
his stomach like jelly, he practiced hitting his pillow with a bar, so as not to
kill.
That night the four stuffed their beds with blanket rolls, put on their
overcoats and stood waiting.
But four drunken drivers were being booked in downstairs and Operation
Escape had to take second place to their examination by the district surgeon
and the laboured issue of prisoner’s property receipts to the four swaying
new inmates of the cells.
The young warder appeared with the keys.
‘Okay, Go!’ he said, and stopped Arthur from trying a reluctant blow on his
head. He would bang his own head against the wall, he had decided. Arthur
walked rapidly out of his cell and knocked over a lemonade bottle. The four
tiptoed out. On the corner of Main and Sauer Streets three bright lights
spluttered and went out, with accomplice timing. The hacksaw blades were
turfed into a rubbish bin in the courtyard lined with empty Volkswagens.
The four split up. Mosie and Jassat walked off towards the Indian residential
area of Fordsburg; Arthur and Harold skirted the block desperately looking
for the car that had not come. Two white down-and-outs tried to pick a fight
with them. Arthur was piddling in a dark corner when the car eventually
picked them up.
‘Four 90-day Men Escape’ said the newspaper headlines. ‘Wives Held for
Questioning.’ A massive police search for the fugitives followed. ‘Goldreich,
described as the Security Branch’s major detainee, is still on the run. Police
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Patrols are at work throughout the land.’ The police are being swamped with
calls about the escapers.’
‘The Net Closes In’. ‘A price of R1,000 is on the head of each escaper.
Induan homes in the country districts of the Transvaal and homes and clubs
in Johannesburg are being searched fot the four.’ ‘Have you seen two
European men and two Indian men walking together?’ plain-clothes
detectives were asking. Descriptions of the four were broadcast over the radio
every twenty minutes at the climax of the manhunt, and all whites were
enjoined to take part in the chase.
For eleven days Arthur and Harold lived in darkness at a deserted house,
eating raw bacon because the cooking made a sizzling noise; unable to use a
heater because it gave off a red glow. The creak I of a floorboard sounded, to
their ears, like a revolver shot through the neighborhood. By five o’clock each
evening, dusk and s deep depression set in. ‘Like being back in that cell,’ said
Harold.
Before each decision to act, tension mounted to breaking point, but in
movement and action there was relief. From one hiding place to another, and
then another. From cover in Johannesburg across the border into Swaziland.
For six hours the two lay together under a tarpaulin. Then they could
stretch, and move, stand up, and talk, and shout to the winds.
‘Goldreich and Wolpe Escape to Francistown’ said the newspaper of 28
August. Minister Vorster said, ‘They were two of our Biggest Fish’.They
had been flown to Swaziland dressed as priests.
In Francistown, Bechuanaland, at 4:15 one morning a knock on the window
woke Goldreich: ‘We’ve come to tell you your plane’s been blown up.’ The
second chartered plane landed in Elizabethville with ten minutes’ fuel to
spare. . . . In the night club black and white jived together to the blare of the
band.
In Marshall Square a new prisoner made his appearance in the men’s
exercise yard: a dimpled policeman, but stripped of his uniform.
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A few hours after the escape, before he had time to claim his reward
money, Johannes Arnoldus Greeff, only recently out of the Pretoria
training depot, broke down and confessed.
On his nineteenth birthday, Greeff’s bid for bail was argued in court,
and turned down, so the young policeman went back into the cells.
Dr. Percy Yutar, it was obvious to all who encountered him during those
months, coveted the job of State Prosecutor in the forthcoming Rivonia
Trial. In an admiring circle of Security Branch detectives he was busy in the
offices of The Grays, Security Branch headquarters in Johannesburg, poring
over documents seized in police raids, and scrutinizing the recorded results
of B Ninety-Day detention victims. The Rivonia Trial was still some months
off: the trial of Constable Johannes Arnoldus Greeff could be turned into a
curtain raiser.
Greeff was brought to trial on two charges: bribery and assisting four men to
escape. His motive was really simple. He had needed a pair of new shoes,
cash to pay for motor car repairs, more cash still. Half way through the trial
he changed his plea to guilty. The Marshall Square staff s wet to court to
give evidence. After one policeman had stepped down d from the witness
box, he looked across at the dock where Greeff stood, wearing a nervous smile
throughout the trial, and winked at him. During court adjournments several
policemen spoke to Greeff, the Press reports noticed, and gave him the
thumbs up sign of encouragement. But at his home in Rustenburg his
mother locked away photographs of him. He had ‘brought disgrace to the
family,’ she said. ‘He has done something dishonourable.’
Dr. Yutar said it was far more serious than that. This was a case of a
young policeman ‘fallen to the evil machinations of traitors who
plotted a violent and hellish revolution in the country, planned on a
military basis’. The State had a cast iron case against those seized in
the Rivonia raid, and their accomplices, now being rounded up.
These persons would be brought to trial in time, the time of the
Security Branch. Meanwhile Greeff was sentenced to six years’
imprisonment.
123
Chapter 9
Reflections
by
Albie Sachs Though I note with regret that I am not as strong as my heroes, I am not unduly put out by the fact that the relationships I am building with my captors involve some measure of compromise on my part. At all times I keep my head up high, and must appear to the police to be remarkably buoyant. Behave like a worm and you will be treated like a worm, I tell myself. So I never crawl or abase myself to them. What does worry me is how the other political prisoners might view my chattiness with the police. My primary loyalty is to my co‐
prisoners and even though I am never able to communicate with them, I know that my conduct and demeanour becomes known to 124
them just s theirs eventually becomes known to me. I am very anxious to avoid any appearance of being favoured because of my white skin. If I could have spoken to them I would have said: Yes, it’s true that the police converse with me at times in a way they never would with a non‐White, and it’s true that at last they’ve given me clean blankets, and it’s true that they always want to let me have the big yard for exercise. But when I speak to them and make jokes, it’s not only for myself, it’s for all of us. It softens the atmosphere in the whole prison, and it shows them that we are bigger and more tolerant than they, that we can take it with a better grace than that with which they can dish it out. And note, I leave the blankets outside in the morning so that you can see them and ask for equality of treatment—I can be a lever to prise out better conditions for all of us. As for the exercise, well, you must have seen how I voluntarily go to the small yard so that you can have the big one. The choice of yards is an infliction rather than a blessing for it means I naturally always exercise it in favour of the small yard so that I have les than my share of the big yard. The only value to me of having the choice is that I can make this solidarity gesture to you. Of course, I am favoured because of my white skin, and because of my standing as an advocate, but the favours are extended to all. Thus you all share in the extra food, you also get those few minutes added to exercise time, and when they come to switch off my light at a fixed hour, instead of whenever convenient to them, they switch yours off too. None of these extras came to me automatically—I had to push hard to get them. There are many problems which beset a White person who joins in the non‐White emancipatory movement. They arise from the fact that while he struggles against racial privilege, in his daily life he enjoys many of the amenities denied to non‐Whites. This conflict pursues him even into the depths of prison and, when he is in a state of extreme loneliness, can be the source of considerable pain to him, 125
especially as he will be virtually helpless to do anything to remedy the situation. A not unconnected problem which causes me much anxiety revolves around the question of violence. Most non‐Whites have for many years believe that the use of violent methods to achieve their liberation is legitimate. Their political leaders persuaded them that they should first examine and try every avenue of non‐violent activity. By about 1962, however, the Government had, in word and deed, made it plain that it was determined to defend apartheid with the gun. Heavy penalties, including whippings, made passive resistance, strikes and boycotts ineffective as means of bringing about change, though they could provide powerful support for more direct challenges. While Africans throughout the rest of Africa were increasingly becoming masters of their own fate, in South Africa they were subjected to ever more burdensome legislation. All active African political organizations and leaders were banned, their newspapers closed down and meetings forbidden. No agitation was to be allowed. In the meantime the armed national struggle in Algeria was nearing victor, and open warfare had broken out in Angola. In South Africa itself Africans in a number of rural areas had openly resisted Government measures, killing Government appointees and destroying Government property, whilst the African workers, in the locations sprawled along the outskirts of the cities, tired of being harried and beaten every time they tried non‐violent activity angrily demanded counter‐attack against the Government. The need for non‐
violence was no longer referred to, and bomb explosions throughout the country announced the start of a new phase of South African political life. I have always loathed violence. From early schooldays I would be the one to break up fights and mediate between disputants. Violence might get rid of obstacles, but it did not solve problems. Yet I have never been a pacifist, intellectually I have accepted the right to use 126
violence in self‐defense, to smash the Nazi invaders, to force colonialists to release their grip. Imprisonment is a form of violence and even in socially advanced countries is obviously necessary, in some degree, for the foreseeable future as a means of dealing with serious anti‐social conduct. Is it cowardice then that makes me recoil at the prospect of one day being called upon to kill and destroy? Not entirely so, of that I am sure. Nor is it, as many Africans would have it, that a White man can not be expected to kill another White man. It is simply that I find it difficult to hate any man, let alone kill him. What emotional sympathy I possess would in fact favour an African rather than a White on the ground that the Africans, at least historically, have justice on their side. If ever I am forced into the trenches I have no doubts as to which side I will be on. Yet I almost envy the Africans their simple and direct anger and their straightforward determination to thrust aside the human barriers to their liberty. As I lie on the mat in my cell I think over these ideas in relations to the personae of my restricted world: the police, the other prisoners, and myself. The more I get to know the policemen, the more difficult it is to contemplate ever trying to kill them. How surprised each one would be to know that as he bends to place my food on the floor, I am wondering how I would feel if I plunged a knife into his back and, as he turns to go, I am speculating on whether I would ever be able to fire bullets into his body or crush his skull with some sort of club, or tear holes in his chest with explosives. I think too of the grief of his family. Then I ask myself how the African prisoner across the yard would think. His hatred would have started early in childhood with the first time the police burst into his home at night, searching for residence documents or for liquor, humiliating his parents and terrifying him before they moved on like invaders to the house next door. A hundred subsequent encounters involving himself or family or neighbours or friends would have reinforced this feeling. As the self‐declared guardians of White supremacy, the police would have 127
to be crushed and dispersed before the White supremacy could ever be destroyed. It was the police who beat and shot the people when they demonstrated. If, in the course of the struggle for African freedom, he were to kill a policeman he would be a hero in the eyes of his family, friends, neighbours and associates. Nobody was forced to join the police force and if someone chose to do so he must bear the consequences. No sympathy should be spared for the policeman’s family, which happily enjoyed all the benefits of White privilege; it is more important to think of the African families whose parents are separated through the policeman’s factions, whose fathers are kept underpaid through his actions. It is he or his colleagues who have been responsible for torturing African people, tying bags over their heads, running electric currents through their bodies, forcing them to drink water and then kicking their stomachs. The whole world knows who is right and who is wrong. Is my squeamishness, I wonder, merely a cover for the fear that I myself might be killed, and is my lack of hate and anger due merely to the fact that I have never suffered directly from the indignities of apartheid, and what deprivations I have known have been voluntarily endured? It is perhaps fortunate for me, when one considers my moral difficulties, that I have never been called upon to join any active resistance group. I have, however, defended alleged saboteurs in Court, and have tried to explain to as wide an audience as possible why it is that a great section of a people has swung over from a policy of non‐violence to one of violence. I have also from public platforms announced that I would go to jail rather than carry a gun for apartheid, expressing the hope that many other Whites would follow my example. I have often warned Whites that their refusal to meet and negotiate with the leaders of the non‐Whites was leading the country to disaster, and judging by the Afrikaans press, I must have particularly scandalized a large number of Whites by stating what seems to me to be an obvious fact, namely that in the event of a showdown the Africans must triumph in the end. 128
Despite the long time I spend in reflection on the matter, I never seem to arrive at any firm conclusion. Looking to the future, I am convinced that the coming years will bring increasing hostility culminating in extremely sharp and widespread clashes. The only role I can see myself filling is that of a propagandist on the side of the Africans appealing to the Whites to lay down arms and negotiate. I would be able to do this with enthusiasm because this would help reduce not only African losses, but also the extent of destruction, both human and physical, in the country that the new Government would ultimately take over. It would be to the benefit of all if the Whites could be persuaded that they stood to gain more by submitting to multi‐racial majority rule than by fighting it out to the bitter end. Though it seems inevitable that the greater part of the persuasion will come from the physical effort of a generation of African patriots resorting to armed struggle, I feel that realistic psychological propaganda could be of considerable supplementary value. At times I look even further into the future, and shudder a little at the thought of one day possibly being charged with the responsibility of locking men up just as I and so many others are being locked up now. May I never have to judge men and mete out punishment. Of one thing I am quite certain, and that is that I could never sanction prolonged solitary confinement as a method of punishment or of gaining information, no matter how desperate the situation. 129
Chapter 10
“My Name is Duggie”
by
Dugmore Boetie
Sisinyana, biggest, and most respected shebeen queen of the early
twenties, catered g for all the subversive elements of Sophiatown. At
her headquarters you found all forms of gambling from dice to the
Chinese numbers game known as Fafi.
The first time that Nine took me to her place and she peeped around
the door, I could only stare and stare. Man, she was beautiful! She
laughed at the way I gaped. When she laughed her whole face
brightened up, including the gold filling that sparkled between two
sets of pearly-white teeth. What laughed most was her eyes; they
were baby blue and they twinkled with all kinds of pleasant
suggestions. The very sound she emitted had the twinkle of music.
One look at that breathtaking face made you swear never y to
patronize another shebeen house.
She then opened the door wider and walked in. I very nearly
screamed foul! The Maker had played a dirty trick on that woman. A
deliberate blunder---a kitchen with the body of a rhinoceros. I once
saw her embracing and kissing a man who weighed well over a
hundred and fifty till he went insane with desire, then calmly she
picked him up and threw him bodily through a closed door. “That’s
for taking advantage of the weaker sex,” she called after him.
Her shebeen house was about one brick cottage and two zinc shacks
from where me and Nine lived. We were practically neighbors. I
went there with Nine or to look for Nine. It was the only place where
he hung out.
130
One Friday I went alone. Three quaver knocks on Sisinyana’s door,
and I heard a rustling sound coming from within. The door opened
partly, and I saw a hole digger concealed behind it. I pushed it open
and it revealed an ill lit passage.
I waited for the hole digger to close the door, then followed after him
down the dimly lit passage. The passage was long and narrow. Both
walls had long stripes of black soot caused by the strategically placed
candles. A globeless electric cord dangled from a narrow black
ceiling. In gone days, it must have been a pretty house.
On both sides of the passage, facing one another, were door frames
without doors. They led to what were known as Skokiaan Drinking
Rooms. These rooms were bare of furniture except for four long
benches placed four square around the room.
Whenever the police made a raid on the premises, Sisinyana would
deny all ownership of them. Besides being used as skokiaan bars for
skokiaan drinkers, they were also used as sleeping quarters for the
cleaners, hole diggers or barmen.
In the midst of all this squalor there was one t room that was
furnished like the inside of a palace, and that was Sisinyana’s own
room. She called it the Holy Spot because of the numerous religious
pictures that were hanging from its walls. When we came to the door
that led to the Holy Spot, the grave digger, I mean hole digger,
knocked.
A voice not without melody bade us enter. As the hole digger turned
the knob, his behaviour reminded me of someone who was about to
enter a sacred place. I did not blame him, because I felt the same.
“Ah! Little Brother!” she exclaimed with genuine joy. Since my
friendship with Nine, I was respected throughout Sophiatown.
“Tell me,” she said, “is Little Brother your real name? Nine is always
calling you that.”
131
“My name is Duggie,” I stammered. I was forever uneasy in the
presence of this woman.
“Duggie?” she repeated. She rolled the name over her tongue as if
fearing it would drop out of her mouth. Dreamily she said:
“Mmmmmmm Duggie, that’s a nice name.”
I didn’t tell her that I got the name through the circus elephant that O
I once looked after. The elephant’s name was Duggie. Every time the
circus population called the name, me and the elephant would turn
our heads in unison. That’s how the name got stuck on me. My
second name, which I’m using as a surname, was supplied by the
Tokai reformatory authorities. They called me Kaffir Boetie. In the
Afrikaans language it means “little kaffir brother’. That’s the name I
must have given Nine the night I wanted to beat him half to death
and became drunk instead.
“You know, Duggie,” said Sisinyana, “I’m feeling low. A customer
just died owing me skokiaan money. Still. “ she shrugged her
shoulders helplessly, “it can’t be helped, if the man had to die, he had
to die. All I know is that when I die, I’ll collect a fortune in hell and
pay my way to heaven with it. I talk too much, I neartly forgot to give
you your message from Nine. He wants you to meet him at the
Johannesburg goods shed first thing in the morning, come rain or
snow.”
“Isn’t he there?”
She shook her lovely head. “No! He said his loins were bothering him
and the only person who can relieve him is his girl in Moroka.” After
a slight pause, she said, “I pity the girl. Let me get you a drink.”
Moroka! Nine once took me there, and I hated the place. A city of
mud and sack. It made Sophiatown look like a dream place; a
difficult township to describe, or understand. A flat heap with
countless alleys. Smoke from thousands of fire galleys. The reddish
132
brown mud buildings looked like anything but houses. It was as if
the builders had had to finish before the sun went g down.
The latrines were built at a distance from the dwelling places. As a
result, when you were at a skokiaan party, and you felt the urge to
relieve nature, it was best never to leave your hat behind but take it
with you. The precaution was very necessary. Not because your hat
was in danger of being pinched or something like that; the danger lay
in the fact that you might never n be able to find your way back to
the same house from the latrine.
I wasn’t surprised when Nine once told me that his girl friend’s
neighbour used to experience considerable difficulty in finding his
own house whenever he came from work. Until Nine sold him an
idea. The man took a long pole and tied an old cap on the one point
of the pole, then he planted the pole in front of his house. Every time
he came back from work, all he did was look for the pole with the cap
on.
I wasn’t surprised that Nine left without me. He knew how I felt
about the place.
Sisinyana, appearing with my six inch mug of skokiaan, caught me
studying a picture that was hanging over the fireplace. It was the
picture of Jesus Christ on the crucifix. I thought this picture was as
out of place here as it would be if it was hanging in the heart of
Prince Lucifer’s domain.
She looked at the picture then said: “Oh, Him. He’s Jesus Christ our
Saviour, the only man I pay protection money to.”
”What kind of protection?” I asked.
Lifting her lovely eyebrows she said: “Does it matter what kind of
protection as long as I’m protected?
133
“You know, Duggie, I once paid protection to a white policeman and
the bastard kept bleeding me even when it wasn’t necessary. So I
fixed him by framing him. Now he’s no more bother. In fact all the
police of Newlands Police Station are giving my place a wide berth.”
She frowned. “Ever framed a policeman, Duggie?” When she saw me
looking stupid, she said, “Sergeant van der Merwe was the worsest
among all the police of Newlands. I say was, he’s been transferred.
“One morning I was short of money to buy my stock when the
bastard came in and demanded his usual cut. I tried explaining but
he just wouldn’t listen. Instead of understanding and coming back on
Monday---because this happened on a Saturday morning---he
decided to search my place. Under the mattress of my bed, he found
four bottles of brandy. He wanted to take me to the charge office, but
I begged off. I told him that I was still waiting for my weekly
customers to come and square the books. I promised to join him later
on at the charge office. He agreed because he knew I was a woman of
my word. That was one time I didn’t keep it. I never followed him.
“Monday morning when the court room opened. I was there. I went
in and made myself comfortable among the spectators. When the
clerk of the court called my name, I stood up. The magistrate read the
charge. He didn’t even look up. On the desk in front of the
prosecutor stood the four bottles of brandy. I hadn’t even had y time
to doctor them. My heart went out to them. Next to them stood the
cheerful van der Merwe.
“”’Sisinyana,’ the magistrate said, ‘you are charged with being in
possession of four bottles of brandy. How do you plead, guilty or not
guilty?’ He waited for the interpreter y to put it across to me.
Meanwhile I had heard and understood every word.
“’Four?’ I said.
“’Yes, four,’ he said, looking directly at me. I shook my head slowly,
then frowned like someone who doesn’t comprehend.
134
“’Four,’ he repeated as he pointed at the four bottles of brandy on the
desk. There followed a ‘Well?’ He waited for me to say they were two
or even less.
“’Your Honour,’ I said, ‘the bottles were not four, they were a dozen.’
“’A what?’
“The interpreter was forgotten. It was man to man. ‘A dozen, Your
Honour.’
“’Then what the he . . . I mean, what happened to the other bottles?’
“’I don’t know, Your Honour, better ask the policeman who raided
my place.’
“He turned to van der Merwe and asked: ‘Is it true what the accused
claims, Sergeant---that there were twelve bottles and not four?’
“’No, Your Honour, there were only four bottles of brandy under the
mattress.’
“I shook my head, ‘Your Honour, would I want to pay for twelve
bottles when I can hardly afford to pay for four? I had to search the
bottom of the barrel besides running to friends and relatives for the
money I have here. Money for twelve bottles.’
“’How much money have you there?’
“’Knowing, Your Honour, that the fine for one bottle of brandy is
fifteen pounds---and I’m going to stop selling it as I’d rather stick to
skokiaan because the fine is only five pounds per four gallons---I
brought along with me, Your Honour, a hundred and eighty pounds
for the dozen bottles.’
135
“The magistrate said to the prosecutor: ‘Count the accused’s money.’
The prosecutor counted.
“’A hundred and eighty pounds, Your Honour.’
“The magistrate then turned to Sergeant van der Merwe. Where are
the other eight bottles, Sergeant?’
“’I told Your Honour that there were only four bottles!’
“’Come now, Sergeant, are you seriously trying to tell me that this
woman, or anyone for that matter, would prefer paying a fine of a
hundred and eighty pounds to that of sixty? Let’s not waste the
court’s time, where are the other eight bottles?’
“’I swear, You Honour, there were only four bottles.’
“’When you found those bottles, assuming there were four under the
mattress,
Chapter 10
Sophiatown or Triomf?
by
136
Miriam Tlali
Mrs. Stein was worried. She was worried and tired. She had no servant. The woman who had been working for her a long time had been arrested for being without a permit to work in Johannesburg. So she had been endorsed out. There were thousands of servants available, but most of those willing to work in the poorer suburbs were from the outside districts, the Homelands. If you were bent on using cheap labour an did not mind the risk of paying a heavy fine when you were found out, you could easily find a drudge from the country. ‘I could call back my previous girl, the one I had before this last one,’ mused Mrs. Stein. ‘She lives in Johannesburg and she’s got a permit. . . but, you know Mrs. Kuhn, she had got so sulky and was very cheeky. She was my best servant, though, as far as cleanliness was concerned.’ Mrs. Stein sighed. ‘Oh, I’m so tired. . . My husband said I should write to that cheeky girl and ask her to come back. . .’ Mrs. Kuhn intruded: ‘I wouldn’t take a girl back after I’d discharged her. She’d always think I couldn’t do without her.’ A day or two later an African woman stood at the counter with her receipt book ready. Ms. Kuhn took it and looked at it. ‘I see you last paid three months ago. Why?’ 137
‘I did not come to pay because I had no money. I had no work. I am looking for work.’ Mrs. Stein looked up. She asked the customer. ‘Can you do sleep‐out work?’ ‘Yes, Missus.’ ‘Where do you stay?’ ‘In Fordsburg, Missus.’ ‘With your husband or boy‐friend?’ ‘Yes, Missus.’ ‘Can you be at Triomf every morning at seven?’ ‘Where is Trio, Missus?’ ‘Triomf, Triomf. Near Newlands. Just after you pass Westdene…’ Mrs. Stein went on, pointing and directing. But the girl’s face was blank. Mrs. Stein tried harder. ‘You know that Main road when you come from Brixton? That Main Road passes from Westdene to Triomf, before you get to Newlands.’ The girl shook her head slowly. ‘Ko Sophia,’ I said. 138
The girl looked from Mrs. Stein to me and back at her. Suddenly understanding, she said: ‘Oh, Sophia. You should say Sophiatown, Missus. I know Sophiatown very well. My Uncle lived there long ago for a long time. The girl had got herself a job and it looked as if Mrs. Stein had got herself a clean‐looking servant, although I knew it would not be for long, as usual. . . Sophiatown. That beloved Sophiatown. Our Sophiatown. As students we used to refer to it proudly as “the centre of the metropolis”. And who could dispute it? The most talented African men and women from all walks of life—in spite of hardships they had to encounter—
came from Sophiatown. The best musicians, scholars, educationists, singers, artists, doctors, lawyers, clergymen. There are a few things for which most of the Johannesburg Africans will never forgive the Nationalists. Amongst them is the removal of Sophiatown. I had many happy as well as sad memories of Sophiatown. I had always planned to go back and take a look at it some time. I had been told that it was transformed into a township for the lower income‐
group whites. My visit there, was, however, quite unplanned and accidental. Robert, the black salesman whom Mr. Bloch did not trust entirely, used to visit the homes of his customers during the day and take their orders. He helped them fill in ‘Particulars Forms’ and sign the Hire Purchase Agreements, which he then brought back to the office. I was then given the job of driving with another black salesman, Henry, during the afternoons and on some evenings and sometimes on Sunday mornings to check and see whether Robert’s sales were genuine or nt. I was also to collect money for deposits and to issue receipts. I can’t say I enjoyed venturing into a jungle like Soweto in 139
the evenings and over week‐ends, and leaving my home and children for nearly twenty‐four hours a day, but it meant more money for me and I needed it. One afternoon as I was about to go out with Henry, he said to me: ‘It looks like we’ll have to take Mrs. Stein to Sophiatown first, Murial. I heard her ask Mr. Block if she could have a lift with us.’ ‘How will all three of us fit into the small front seat, Henry?’ I asked. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of letting me sit outside on that open carrier!’ ‘N, of course I’m not. If she doesn’t want to wait for her husband because he’ll be a bit late and she’s too lazy to walk to the bus‐stop after work, then she must just accept what I offer her.’ Mrs. Stein came. I stood apart to see what would happen. She motioned to me to go in first saying that she would be the first one to be dropped off so she might just as well sit next to the door. As we drove along Henry said to me in the vernacular: ‘Muriel, can you see what I see?’ ‘What?’ ‘That the lady with us keeps her face turned out to the left almost sticking out through the window all the time?’ ‘Yes, I see it.’ ‘I think she is trying very hard not to breathe the air inside the van with us. She wants to breathe the free air outside. But look, there are hundreds more like you and me outside this van. If she doesn’t want 140
to breathe the same air with the kaffirs, she’ll have to carry her own air about with her like those people who sink into the bottom of the oceans.’ We both laughed. The van moved down main Road from Westdene, past First Gate in Western Native Township, then past Toby Street, the first street as you enter Sophiatown. It was moving through the hold familiar places. I felt like reaching out and touching them. The van turned right, into Tucker Street, Sophiatown. Some way up the street the van stopped and Mrs. Stein said: ‘This is where I stay, Muriel.’ I was not listening, I was thinking. Just a few yards further up, I was led out of my uncle’s home to the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a young bride, happy and full of hopes for the future. I asked Henry to pick me up later on. I alighted and walked up to the corner of Victoria Road and Good Street. I moved slowly over the rocks and broken bricks towards the spot where I had knelt on my wedding day, facing the altar and wall behind the pulpit. The wall still stood, only partially destroyed, with the engraved letters on it vivid and legible below the painted crucifix. They read: GOD OUR FATHER—CHRIST OUR REDEEMER—MAN OUR BROTHER. As if in open ridicule, a declaration of hope and redemption in the midst of ruin and chaos. I thought of that week when, all efforts to resist being removed having failed, the women’s section of the now banned African National Congress decided that on the Sunday before the day of the removal, all women and children would hold a prayer meeting on 141
the “Freedom Square”. . . . They knelt there, praying to our forefathers, to the gods of Africa. They sang freedom songs of hope, surrounded as expected b policemen while those in plan clothes took notes. I looked at the place where the tears of the African women and children fell and soaked into the soil. I do not think they will ever dry. They, the whites, have built their Triomf on top of them. Whether they have triumphed or not, time alone will tell. The next day, Sophiatown was virtually under a siege. The residents of Sophiatown were removed under police escort. All the pavements were lined with heavily armed police and soldiers. There was practically no resistance. How could there be? Father Huddleston and the African leaders were removed to the nearby Newlands Police Station. When the residents had been removed, the bull‐dozers moved in like tanks, destroying, smashing, razing, reducing everything to ruin All around was dust, heaps of dirty bricks, soot and rubble. . . Henry called me back from the past: ‘Muriel, what do you think you are doing? How long do you think you’ll stand there and admire the beautiful European houses?’ I returned to the van. But a rich contralto voice, followed by a tenor and a bass, repeating a haunting, mournful song, still echoed in my ears: Mabayek’umhlaba Wetu. . . Thina Sizwe. . . Thina Siwesinsundu. . . Sikalele Sikalela Izwe Iethu Elathathwa. . . 142
Elathathwa Ngabamhlophe. . . Mabaeke. . . Mabayekumhlaba Wethu. . . Let them leave our land. . . We the Black Nation. . . We weep for our country Which was taken by the white ones. . . Let them leave our land alone! ‘What do they call this lace now?’ asked Henry; ‘Trim?’ ‘Triomf, Henry. That means triumph in English.’ ‘What the hell,’ said Henry. ‘What triumph? All those black cockroaches, bed‐bugs and lice they have built their beautiful houses on. . .where is all that pride of theirs? All those nice gardens of theirs where they have planted lawns and flowers are fertilized by the urine and stools of the black children who used to run all over naked, neglected and starving, while their mothers cared for their white kids. All those filthy buckets from the latrines the children used to empty into the pavements and streets on New Year’s Day—where’s all their white pride?’ Henry cursed and swore and worked himself into such a state that his whole body was shaking. He fumbled impatiently in his pocket with his left hand for a cigarette, his right hand holding the steering wheel. He found one and put it between his wet lips. He lighted it, puffing and fuming. Suddenly he burst into a dreadful fit of coughing, rocking violently until the sweat came running down his forehead and temples. ‘Why don’t you stop smoking?’ I said. ‘You know that your chest is not so good. What about that spot on your lung? Has it healed?’ 143
Henry did not reply. Chapter 11 144
The South Africa I Know by Peter Magubane I was born in what is now called Vrededorp on 18th January 1932. This was an Indian area only two miles west of Johannesburg. The Indians have since been driven out and only whites live there now. My father was Isaac, a tall slender man with “colored” features who spoke the oppressors’ language, Afrikaans. No one ever bothered to explain the reason for this to me. My mother, Welheminah Mbatha, was a pitch black woman who was proud of herself and was not prepared to take a nuisance from anybody. It was Sophiatown where I grew up. This was a black suburb of Johannesburg about five miles from the city. In those days it was cosmopolitan. I grew up rubbing shoulders with Chinese, whites, Indians, and colored and this was life. It throbbed, you lived at the moment. My parents were later moved from Sophiatown too. So happy were the Afrikaners at the successful removals, they named the white township built on the black man’s tears Triomph—meaning Triumph. History waits to see whether the Afrikaner was as triumphant as he thought. My father worked hard. He had a vegetable cart driven by horses we loved dearly. From early childhood I remember helping my father sell vegetables. At the age of six I was farmed out to my uncle in Ermelo in the Eastern Transvaal, my mother’s home. My aunt turned out to be a vicious woman who meted out harsh countryside treatment to the city child. My mother later told me of coming to visit me. She sat in the train chatting with fellow passengers in the third‐class “blacks only” coach 145
as the train approached a siding. Her eye caught the sight of a little boy trapped between barbed wire strands. It was me. The merciless Eastern Transvaal winter wind threw me to and fro between the wires. I wore an oversize coat that I got as a Christmas present from my uncle. The barbed wire had been put up by a white farmer to keep stray animals and stray blacks from wandering into the “baas’” property. I used to assist my father in selling vegetables after school and on weekends. During my spare time I would collect empty bottles and scrap metal and sell them to white‐owned scrap dealer shops. My father concentrated on selling vegetables to the white market. Not a day passed without a white woman insulting him for knocking on the front door. In fact, in Mayfair, a white suburb, some entrances were marked “No Dogs and Natives Allowed.” That was not the end of the story. My father was frequently woken up at the dead of night by white policemen who demanded his pass and license for selling vegetables. Often scuffles broke out that ended with my father locked up. He always lost these cases. He was always charged with assaulting the police, it did not matter that they had started the fight. My mother would join in these fights in defense of my father and accumulated her own record of assaults. My father belonged to no political organizations. He fought his own political battles. My father vowed he would never carry the dreaded “pass” or “reference book,” as he claimed he was no white man’s boy to carry the tag of a number by which he would be identified. But when things were very bad and he couldn’t run his business without certain documents, he decided to take an identity card as a colored—
a person of mixed blood. This did not require him to register for employment as did the black man’s pass. My last memory of my father was after my first marriage, when he again clashed with the law. He was arrested and taken to the 146
Johannesburg prison known as “The Fort.” I was later notified that my father had been admitted to the Baragwanath Hospital, and when I visited him I found a dying man. This left an incredibly open wound in me. The shock was too great, for I had dreams for my parents. Not long after my father’s death my mother died. My mother took me as a child to a Roman Catholic school in Sophiatown, but after three days of schooling all the children who were not Catholic were told to leave as the only space available was for Catholic children. So I went to a place called Lutheran School. After passing my Standard Six I attended the Western Native High School, where I did Form IV and gave up school for a job on Drum magazine. I had a dream of joining he photographic staff, though I first had to work as a messenger, a tea‐boy, a driver. Two of my friends worked there—Can Themba, a reporter, and Bob Gosani, a photographer. They were both blacks and very good in their respective fields, and in those days Drum was very good. It still exists but now it is nothing to talk about. It was the only magazine then in South Africa exposing all the inhuman things done to blacks by white South Africans in the government. While striving for Drum I got married t Gladys Nala. My marriage was not very successful because she did not approve of my late home coming and wanted me to leave the job. So I had to chose between my career and my wife. Because I adored photography I chose photography, and later we were divorced. The picture editor of Drum at that time—the early 1950’s—was Jurgen Schaderberg, a young German photographer who was very good at picture taking and very strict to those like me who were learning I spoke to him about acquiring a camera for me. He did so and it was paid for by my father because my earnings at the time were very little. I used to spend most of my time trudging the streets of Johannesburg at night taking photographs, experimenting. I would 147
go back to the office to process and finally I would sleep there, because there was no transport that would take me back to Sophiatown at that time of the night. This was one thing that led to my divorce with my wife. It was a great sacrifice but I’m not sorry for having sacrificed. My sacrifice paid off. Whenever I used to go out with photographers and reporters I watched what they did, especially Bob Gosani. He was a very good photographer, it is just a pity that he did not live long enough to be able to show the world what kind of photographer he was. At the time, those years, journalism was unknown among the blacks. Those among us who worked on Drum were fortunate because some of the people on the magazine were whites from overseas who were prepared to teach us. Jurgen Schaderberg used to let me print thirty prints, forty prints and print the whole lot, and sometimes I would have to repeat and print the whole lot, and sometimes I would have to print right through the night. I did not mind because I knew that I was learning. My first assignment was in 1955 in Bloemfontein, where I covered the African National Congress Convention. I took a lot of pictures using a 2 ¼‐by‐ 2 ¼‐inch square camera, a Yashica, the camera that Jurgen Schadeberg had bought for me. I went back to the office with good results and from that day I never looked back. In 1956 women of all races, well over 30,000 of them, marched on Pretoria. We journalists operated freely without any hindrance from the police. Again in 1956, over a hundred people, black and white, were arrested and charged with treason. The trial was held the same year. It was the longest trial to be held in South Africa and the first major political one. During the treason trial I was arrested three times for obstructing police by taking pictures. I had no police press pass. That was the first time for me to be inside a cell. I was kept there for about three hours and later charged with obstruction. My case lasted 148
for two weeks, and I was in court every day. At one stage I fell asleep while the court was proceeding. The magistrate ordered me to wake up and warned me that if I was found sleeping I would be charged with contempt of court. I was acquitted. The magistrate decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. But I’m sure my police file was opened that year. Not long after I had another run‐in with the police. I got orders from my editor to stand in front of the Grace Building, which was the police headquarters in Johannesburg at the time, and take pictures of each and every person who came out or went in. I tried to carry out the instructions even though I didn’t know—and still don’t—just why he wanted the pictures. I must have taken no more than ten frames when four policemen started to manhandle me and ask me what I was doing. I told them what my instructions were, but they took me before a Major Spengler, who was in charge of the Security Police. He questioned me, took the film, and said that I should go back and ell my editor that Major Spengler had taken the film. If the editor wanted to se he would have to sue Major Spengler himself. Then he let me go. Nobody sued. In 1957 I went to Frenchdale in Cape Province to take pictures of the people—political people—who had been banished there. Their life was very sad. In those years they used to banish people to remote areas, very dry areas far from towns, far from other people, giving them only a gag of meal to last them a month and no meat whatsoever. But most of my time was spent covering various disturbances. This was never easy. The police always gave us a bad time, demanding passes and, even though we had them, ordering us out of the area, sometimes at gunpoint. In 1957 a number of tribesmen and women were arrested after disturbances we had covered n Zeerust, a town in the Western Transvaal. They were charged with violence, inciting other people. All pressmen were forbidden to attend the court hearing. Can Themba and I went over 149
there dressed as tribesmen. I went to the nearest Indian shop, bought a half loaf of bread, concealed my camera in the bread, and walked over to the court building. As the police were arriving with the tribesmen, I was able to photograph them while pretending to eat my bread. When I realized that this was no longer safe, I went back to the shops and bought myself a pint of milk, drank the contents, and concealed my camera in the empty container, pretending to suck on the straw, and got my pictures. We had many adventures. Once Nat Nakasa and I went to Sophiatown to look round for a story and pictures. We spotted a group of men who were being arrested for not having reference books‐‐what is known as a “pass.” We parked the car, and I took a few pictures. A colored policeman who was in charge of the crew ordered me to stop, but I rushed to the car and drove off. He pulled out his revolver, meaning to shoot, and as I drove off I heard him shouting that I should stop, otherwise he would shoot, and once the car was moving I tried to duck. Unfortunately I drove right into the back of a stationary van. Nobody was hurt, but that same policeman arrested us and took us don to Newlands police station, where we were charged with failing to pay our yearly tax and failing to have our passes signed by our employer. Tom Hopkinson, who was then editor of Drum, had to come over and speak to the man in charge of the police station. We were let off with a warning that if we were found in Sophiatown again without our reference books in order we would be arrested. You never new when the police would turn on you In 1958 there were demonstrations by women against the issuing of passes to African women. A number of demonstrators were arrested and charged, and while they were appearing in court some of their supporters gathered outside. The police chased them and hit them with batons. While I was taking pictures of this, I was also arrested. They took me into Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court, where a senior 150
officer warned me and said that if I didn’t stop interfering with the police I would be locked up. I explained to him that I had not interfered with the police, that I had been working, taking pictures of police hitting women with batons. They finally released me. I did many stories for Drum—in South‐West Africa, covering disturbances in Pondoland, reporting on child farm labor. For the last, Nat Nakasa and I went to Nigel, southeast of Johannesburg. We got to one farm, parked the car, and went into the potato fields. Children were working there. While I was taking pictures Nat was talking to the workers. Soon a police van appeared and took us off to the police station. One of the policemen there wanted to beat us up. In my hand I had a light meter. I opened it up and showed it to him and he saw the needle moving up and down. He asked me what it was for and I replied that it was a radio. “It is transmitting everything you say to us here back to our office. Our office already knows that we are arrested and you want to beat us up. If you want to go ahead with beating us up you can do so, but rest assured that our office already knows.” He quickly went into the inner office and spoke to his sergeant, who came out and demanded to see the instrument. I showed it to him. He too was satisfied with my explanation and said that we should leave the area immediately. If he should find us there again, he would have to exercise his powers. We left. If it had not been for my brainwave I am sure we would have been assaulted and ended by being locked up. Nineteen sixty was the year of Sharpeville. What happened was this. The Pan‐Africanist Congress launched a campaign against the pass system. Every member of the organization was going to take his pass and turn it in to the nearest police station, saying that he didn’t want to carry a pass any more and if they wanted to arrest him they could do so. This was done throughout the country. But at Sharpeville, unfortunately, the police opened fire on the crowd of people standing outside the station. More than sixty people were killed. I had a hard 151
time getting into the area, which was all fenced off, but I got in there only three minutes after the shooting and was able to take a few pictures. I had never seen so many people dead before; I could not work easily. When I got back to the office Tom Hopkinson was very much angry with me. I did not have the pictures he expected me to have. I had taken pictures from a distance. I did not have the close‐
ups which would have shown the grimness of the situation. Hopkinson warned me that if I was going to get shocked in circumstances like this I would never make it as a news photographer. From that day I made up my mind that whenever I find myself in a situation like Sharpeville I shall think of my pictures fist before anything. I no longer get shocked; I am a feelingless beast while taking photographs. It is only after I complete my assignment that I think of the dangers that surrounded me, the tragedies that befell my people. When the Sharpeville victims were buried I had a chance to cover the funeral, and this time I made sure to do the job right. The editor was pleased with my pictures. A number of them were syndicated all over the world. I remember, by the way, an incident during that service. Reverend Mahabane was speaking and said, “God has given and now he has taken.” He was nearly killed. The people went mad, saying, “God has not taken these people, these people were shot dead by the police. Why don’t you say God has given and the South African police have taken?” He was replaced by another minister. I now can see that Sharpeville was a turning point in many ways. In the 1950’s political organizations like the African National Congress and the Pan‐Africanist Congress were legal, and demonstrations were also legal. Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC, did not believe in violence. In those days it was mostly older people who took part in the demonstrations. These demonstrations were peaceful. There were no shootings and no tear gas was ever used. At worst, people were baton‐charged by the police. 152
In 1959 there was a split in the African National Congress, and the Pan‐Africanist Congress was born. This group had a much younger membership. The pass demonstration of 1960 was their idea. The Sharpeville shootings were followed by violent outbreaks all over the country. A large number of people supporting the Pan‐Africanist Congress were arrested and m any trials were held, with long jail sentences and many sent to Robben Island, a special long‐term penitentiary. Angry protests occurred even in rural areas like Pondoland and parts of Transkei, with house of pro‐government blacks burned and chiefs killed. In 1961, after the “stay‐at‐home” demonstrations, both the ANC and PAC were banned and could no longer operate in the open. The government declared a state of emergency and Parliament passed a number of special laws “for the safety of the country.” The detention law had permitted holding people up to 90 days without trial; after Sharpeville this was increased to 180 days, and they could keep on detaining you for additional periods. I continued to have brushes with the police. In 1962 they arrested me and charged me with obstruction during demonstrations on the City Hall steps against the Sabotage Bill, but there was no case. Again, in 1965 when I had started free‐lancing for the Rand Daily Mail, a Johannesburg newspaper, I had another run‐in. As it was law that blacks cannot occupy the same darkroom with whites, I had to obtain a darkroom somewhere in the city. I found one through an acquaintance. But under the Group Areas Act a black cannot have any business in town—including a darkroom. For some time I managed to avoid the police by instructing the girl at the front desk to say I was out whenever they came. But one day when I was at work in the darkroom two black men—one carrying a Bible and dressed as a priest—came in and asked for me. The girl was fooled. They turned out to be the police. When I came out they told me I 153
should accompany them to the police station. When we got there the police wanted to know how and why I had gotten the place, and said that I must give it up because by law I wasn’t supposed to be there. I later moved out and finally had to use the darkroom of the Rand Daily Mail. I must say that the problem wasn’t entirely the authorities. Some white staff photographers did not want to have blacks in the photographic department either. But the Rand Daily Mail is a liberal newspaper that for many years has employed black journalists even though some of the white journalists resent the idea. Today, with riots in the black township of Soweto, black photographers are able to show their skills. The paper needs their pictures. And to some extent that was true even back in the 960’s. There was nothing anybody could do to have me fired. I was not there to worry about what they did. I was there to sell my labor and therefore I did so to the best of my ability. I would not bother myself for small minds. I was being recognized for my skill as a photographer. The first time was in 1958, when I was still on Drum and Tom Hopkinson helped me choose an entry for the South African best pictures of the year. I got two prizes, first and third. That’s when I realized that if I worked harder I would be able to be one of the top cameramen in the country. Then in 1963 I was the first black man to have an exhibit in South Africa, at an art gallery in Johannesburg, and the next year I went to London and to Germany to exhibit my pictures. These shows were a success and I went to New York, where Look magazine gave an assignment to Nat Nakasa and me to shoot a story on the South. I was never able to do it; my friend committed suicide. He had left South Africa on an exit permit and gone to Zambia, where he was declared a prohibited immigrant, and though he finally got to the United States he wanted desperately to go back to Africa and had no papers. I had known Nat Nakasa for a long time and his death was a 154
shock to me. I went back to South Africa and started working for the Rand Daily Mail. Now I covered a number of removals, when black people were moved from their homes in places that had been declared white, and trucked off to areas with no toilet facilities, no running water but maybe a river, no schools, hospitals, churches, shops. People had to walk miles to buy food. I covered another story on child labor, and this time was caught and fined for trespassing. But it was in 1969 that disaster really befell me. In June 1969 I drove to Pretoria to take clothes and fruit to Ms. Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, the wife of imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. At that time she was in detention too. I arrived at the women’s section of the Pretoria Prison and asked to speak to a black woman warder to whom I had spoken earlier on the phone. I could feel that there was something wrong. I could feel that I was surrounded. But then I asked myself, why would I be surrounded? I handed over the clothes and fruit to the black warder and was walking back to my car when four policemen grabbled me and threw me to the ground, and throttled me, and then loaded me into a car that was parked next to mine and took me to the Compol Building, where the Security Police have their headquarters. I later found out that they had thought I was plotting to get Mrs. Nomzamo Winnie Mandela out of prison. The entire prison was surrounded. That day was the start of my interrogation. I was made to stand on three bricks for five straight days and nights without a wink of sleep, and to drink black coffee through the night. At two‐hour intervals the two officers interrogating me would be relieved by others. Only when I needed to go to the toilet would they let me off the brick platform; when I needed to urinate they would merely hand me a tin to make use of. 155
After five days my feet were swollen and I started to urinate blood. They called Major Theunis Johannes Swanepoel (nicknames “The Redman”), who gave me tablets to ease the pain and told them to take me to a cell. In the cell I was held in solitary confinement. They gave me fie dirty blankets, two mats, an empty bucket to shit in, a mug, a bucket of water, and a spoon. I complained to the warder about the dirty blankets. It was not a five‐star hotel, he told me. If I wanted clean blankets I should go to a five‐star hotel. I had been detained, along with many others, under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. Mrs. Mandela was among the accused and so were several other black and colored journalists. The oldest of us was sixty‐nine, the youngest only eighteen. After six months we were taken to court and charged, and tough the charges were withdrawn we were immediately detained again and put back into solitary confinement and held incommunicado. In February 1970 a court acquitted us saying that we could not be charged with the same offense twice. But the state was not satisfied with that. Once ore we went back into prison. At the time we were not told why, but later I learned that we were being held under Section 10 of the Terrorism Act. Only in September 1970 were we finally acquitted and released. It is against the law in South Africa to write about prisons or take photographs of them. I do not want to talk about communications in prison or to discuss other prisoners; many of them are still being held and I do not want to make it harder for them or for others who will be there in the future. But I can describe what it was like for me in solitary confinement. When you arrive you are told that you are not allowed to speak to anyone but prison officials or police officers, not allowed to sing, not allowed to whistle, not allowed to peep through the windows, not allowed to read or write. You are allowed thirty minutes of exercise 156
in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon. Once a week you are allowed to have a bath, on the day you wash your clothes. You are in a world of your own, without company. You listen to the birds sing. Sometimes one would perch on the window sill and look into the cell. I would wish I could speak to it so as to be able to relate my problems. Yet at my slightest move it would fly off. In my heart I would say, “I wish I was as free as that bird.” Sometimes I would scream, box the wall, pace the floor, count the nails on the cell door. The only way I could tell the time was by the sun’s rays. My light would burn twenty‐four hours a day, so I lost track of time. So many things would come into my mind but the last thing I thought of was suicide. You cease to exist, you become an animal, your vocal cords are affected. You become sensitive to sounds. When you hear footsteps coming you think they are for you. You fear them. Yet you want to speak to somebody. Is it the warder coming to take you to more interrogation? Or for exercise? At sleeping time the ordinary common‐law prisoners would sing church songs and say prayers. I deeply wished that I was in their company. But all I could do was listen. In the early hours of the morning I was awakened by the clicking of dishes in the in the kitchen, getting ready for breakfast at 6 A.M. Lunch was at 10 A.M., supper at 2 in the afternoon. Then we were counted and the cell doors double‐locked. It took a long time to go to sleep. In September 1970, when we were finally acquitted, the government was not done with us yet. Within two weeks orders came that we were banned for five years. A banning order is signed by the Minister of Justice and means this: a banned person is not allowed to talk to more than one person at once, to attend any gathering, to enter any educational premises or any building containing a printing press, to enter another township 157
without a permit, to talk with another banned person, or to live in the magistracy of Johannesburg without a permit. Being banned meant that my job as a newspaper photographer was finished, it meant the end of my profession. My pictures couldn’t be captioned with my name, and of course I couldn’t take a picture of more than one person at a time. A banning order leaves you naked. Unless you make up your mind to fight it with all your might, you will become a lunatic. At any time of the night police may come to your house and ransack it, keeping your whole family awake, going through each and every piece of paper in the house. You no longer have privacy. You cannot even talk to your wife while the police are there. Should a neighbor come by to offer help, he is threatened with arrest. Your employer will be interrogated, your fellow workers questioned, informers are planted around you. You are no longer a human being, people run away from you, it is as if you have leprosy. Your relatives, your friends are afraid to come near you, afraid even to greet you. I had married again in 1962 but was divorced three years later, and now in the absence of my children I spent lonely days and nights in my five‐room house in Diepkloof (a part of Soweto). There was no one to talk to, even my sweethearts ran away like rats. I was not bothered, though; I was already used to isolation, from prison. During this period I lost all my friends and have since fallen out with some of my relatives. For two years I kept my head by buying carpets, clothes, and furniture and selling them in Diepkloof. But people came to buy and sometimes promised to pay me the next day, then never came back. As a result I lost a lot of money in that project. I was not much of a merchant. Finally I got a job as a debt collector. The banning wasn’t the worst of it either. In march 1971 I was again arrested. Three policemen came into the house and said they had a warrant for my arrest and wanted to search the house. They 158
examined every negative, every scrap of paper. Then they took me by car to Pretoria. When we got there my hands were handcuffed to a beam behind my back in the interrogation room and my legs were manacled. When I asked for water they would bring it right to my mouth and then fling it in my face. In the morning my feet were swollen. I was taken back to Pretoria Central Prison and spent ninety‐
eight more days in solitary before they released me. During this time they took me again to the Compol Building, where the Security Police showed me a letter with a Zambian return address and a Rhodesian postmark. It was addressed to the Prime Minister and stated that the photographs taken by Magubane at the African National Congress had besmirched the country’s name abroad. It also said that there were plans to abduct the Prime Minister. That letter was allegation number one against me. Allegation number two came from testimony by a man named Peter Cheke who had identified me in a police line‐up and had made serious charges against me. This man later confessed that he had been paid by a man in Port Elizabeth to make the charges. Whether this was true, I do not know. In any case, the allegations were dismissed and I was released after ninety‐eight days and went back to life as a banned person. Once again during this period I was arrested for violating a technical point in my banning order and held in prison—in Leeuwkop Prison in Johannesburg—for six months. But this was not solitary confinement. It was a struggle to pull through the five years of my restrictions. I was not able to work as a photographer and I could not afford to take pictures for my own amusement, since cameras and film cost too much. The editor of the Rand Daily Mail applied for relaxation of the banning order but it was of no use. Not until October 1975 was it lifted. The newspaper reemployed me as a photographer. But during those long years I had spent a total of 586 days in solitary, six months in ordinary jail, and five years as a ghost. I had never been convicted of any crime. 159
Only one incident during this time gave me satisfaction. In spite of being banned I had an exhibit at a Johannesburg art gallery. I was forced to submit the pictures first to the magistrate, who denied me permission to show news photos (even though they had been published before), and in the end I was allowed only to exhibit some experimental abstract pictures that I had been working on when I was first arrested in 1969. The show was well received. What was it like to go back to work after so long? It was like being back from the dead. I was as happy as a child being given ice cream. But it was uphill, because I had lost the photographer’s eye I had before my detention and banning and was not accustomed to mingling with people freely. I realized that if I did not work hard I would not be able to take the hard‐hitting pictures I had taken in the past. That first day I went shooting with Sydney Duval, doing a story on Johannesburg. I was beaming with joy but unable to get the kind of pictures I wanted. And in the back of my mind I could not help thinking about the more than two hundred others who were still banned or detained. Soon the action started again. I covered the demonstrations outside the new Johannesburg Supreme Court during the National African Youth Organization political trials; people were chased by police with attack dogs and I got good pictures. Clive Emdin and I covered the bus boycott in Newcastle. But it was in June 1976 that the really big story began. It isn’t over yet. Maybe it will never be over. I mentioned how back in the 1950’s most demonstrations were run by serious adult political leaders and how most of the participants were adult too. By the 1970’s nearly all the adult black politicians had been detained or jailed and their parties outlawed. This may explain why the riots that broke out in Soweto in June involved mostly children. The South African government, with its police and troops and its version of law, had succeeded in shattering organized black 160
opposition. Now, almost without any control or organization, black high school students were acting out their anger. I remember that the Star newspaper had a placard on the 15th of June 197 saying that demonstrations were planned for the next day by Soweto pupils. Soweto is the main black area outside Johannesburg; more than two million blacks live there. The next morning I headed into Soweto to see what was going on and was quickly swept up. I photographed such things as policemen firing at students carrying signs protesting the fact that they had to learn Afrikaans in school, students burning cars, police shooting tear gas into crowds of student, all sorts of scattered violence. This went on for several days. It was difficult to work as a photographer in the township. The police do not like to see people taking pictures when they are shooting or charging with batons. The students too, at least at first, used to resent being photographed. I and my black colleagues were beaten and lost cameras and had our clothes torn by both sides. One time a white policeman pressed the muzzle of a machine gun against my temple threatening to shoot me. I sat praying: for the slightest mistake he could pull the trigger. Three days later I was hit on the head with the butt of a revolver and punched in the stomach, my films taken. Assaulting the black press was a way of intimidating them, of trying to make them stop telling the truth. In some quarters, white reporters were asking questions about whether the stories told by black journalists were correct. At one point the black staff of the Township edition of the Rand Daily Mail threatened to resign because their integrity was being questioned, but it was immediately sorted out by some white reporters who stood by the side of their black colleagues. You will excuse me for using the terms black and white. In South Africa it is the only way you can describe certain aspects of life. The Soweto riots broke out again in August and I went out again to cover them. I saw, and photographed, people being assaulted by the 161
police for taking part in “stay‐away” days (refusing to go to work in a kind of general strike). On one occasion while I was taking pictures, a white policeman attacked me and smashed my nose; I had to spend five days in Baragwanath Hospital. I suppose that the worst thing I saw was Zulu men from the hostels who armed themselves with knobkerries, assegais, and shields and went right through the township systematically breaking down doors and windows assaulting people. These were men from tribal areas far away, living as single men in the hostels in Soweto. They resented being told what to do by the students. It was easy for the police to encourage them to fight other blacks, and this is exactly what happened. I saw it myself. When I went to a police station to report what the Zulus were doing the police asked me what I expected them to do. “Why doesn’t black power fight back?” they said. And later that day when I went into another police station and found it full of blood and packed with women and children who had been injured by the Zulus, I was told by an officer in charge that black power must taste its own medicine. On following days I tried to cover the actions of the Zulus in Soweto and saw how when the residents attempted to fight back, the police would attack them with tear‐gas bombs. Several times the police warned me to get out of the area. I knew that trouble for me was on the way. At last on August 26 I was detained again; they had enough of my nuisance. I was locked up under Section 10 of the Internal Security Act, without charges, In Modder Bee Prison in Johannesburg. I was not in solitary, but again my life was shattered, my freedom taken away from me, and my cameras put to rest. My lawyer went to the Security Police to make inquiry. I was an agitator, he was told, and the police spokesman expressed surprise when asked if I had committed any offense. “The arrest was in connection with Magubane and what he does. We don’t arrest people 162
because they work for the Rand Daily Mail.” After all, he said, if I had committed an offense I would have been charged in a court of law. Now, of course, the reason I was detained was that I had become an embarrassment to the government. Actually they did me a favor by jailing me; I would have been a sitting duck for the police in Soweto, who would probably have simply shot me and put the blame on my people. (I remember hearing one policeman say that they should kill all the bloody black pressmen or arrest the lot, because they write shit.) As it happened, seven of the black journalists covering Soweto were arrested at this time and three others in the Cape. We weren’t interrogated but shared big cells in Modder Bee, just waiting. The others were finally released before Christmas of 1976, and I was released three days after Christmas. While I was still in Modder Bee, the Rand Daily Mail asked the prison department to permit my photograph file to be sent to me so that I could prepare an entry for the annual Stellenbosch‐Farmers Winery Award. This is a prize for journalists comparable to the American Pulitzer Prize. The authorities refused, saying that it would be an embarrassment to South Africa if I were to win while in detention because I would not be able to attend the presentation. Two of my colleagues, Clive Emdin and Vitta Palestrante, brave men to whom I am very grateful, put together an entry for me and managed to submit it even though it was late. Had they not done what they did I would never have been the proud winner of the Enterprising Journalism Award of 1976, the first black journalist to receive it. A few months later I also won the Nicholas Tomalin Award, which is given by the London Sunday Times in memory of a British reporter who lost his life in the Yom Kippur War, and I was able to go to London to accept it. 163
I do not know what will happen next to me. I will go on working in South Africa, taking the best pictures that I can. I hope they will not all be pictures of violence. Yet as long as there is no dialogue between the government of South Africa and the black man, there will be no turning point from violence. As long as the government is not prepared to recognize the black man as a citizen and give him his full rights in the country of his birth, I can see no change except for the worse. The black man des not want to drive the white man into the ocean. White and black should share the fruits of the country equally and together. As long as there are detentions and deaths in detention, the black man can only become more adamant in opposition. I am not an advocate of violence, but we are being pushed to it. My wish is that everyone in the country should share the table and try to solve our problems amicably, with no bloodshed. There is still time and plenty of room for that. It will not help the white government of South Africa to refuse deliberately to feel the winds of change and see the pace of the clock; everybody is marching forward while the government marches backward. Chapter 12 Kippie’s Memories 164
by Kippie Moeketsi The early days of Jazz, the Harlem Swingsters, the Manhattans, the musical ‘King Kong’, and the emergence of Zenzi Miriam Makeba and Dollar Brand. In my family we were music inclined. My brother, Jacob, is a pianist—he was taught by a white woman. Father played the organ and mother would sing hymns. The whole family was like that. It is only my sister who was not into music. I took up music at twenty and taught myself to read it. My late brother, Andrew, used to sing bo‐
Itchi Mama, old harmony songs. Every time I saw him I would ask: ‘Kana, tell me, man. How do I know the clarinet keyboard? Where must I place my fingers?’ He would shout at me, ‘Hai, no. Put your fingers there!’ Then I would ask again, ‘What is a crochet?’ He would say, ‘Aga man, you’re worrying me. It’s a beat.’ And from there I had to see to it myself. I had to find out on y own what a crochet was. He left me there! I also read music books. I would say it is the Ortolandi that taught me music. I learnt to play the clarinet with a saxophone book. ‘Stre, that’s how I taught myself music. I can still play the clarinet. I didn’t practice how to play the saxophone, I just play it. Yah, once you know a clarinet, a saxophone is a boy. 165
The first group I played with, ‘The Band in Blues’, broke up firstly because I didn’t want to play in Denver, esidigidigini. The other guys liked to play at the Jorissen Centre and other such places. In those days the tsotsis were rough. Musicians used to get a hiding from now and then. They would say to us that we were thinking that we are clever, and better than them. Sometimes we would play from 8:00 pm to 4:00 am non‐stop. It was like that. Sometimes the tsotsis would force us to play right through up to 9:00 am. By force! We played all the songs they wanted. I remember one incident in which I managed to escape with my dear life. It was in ’48 when we were still playing at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. Tsotsis came, man. There were about seventeen, carrying tomahawks, and chopping everybody in the hall for no reason. After they had finished with the audience, they came onto the stage while we stood glued there, frightened. They then began chopping up our instruments and just then we ran for our lives with the thugs in hot pursuit. One of them chased me down Von Wielligh Street. It was about three o’clock in the morning. He shouted at me, ‘Kom hier, jong, Kippie!’ His name was Seven. Fortunately for me, a police van appeared and the thug disappeared. The tsotsis were attacking us for the fun of it. They were from Alexandra township. I think it was not yet the Spoilers; it was before their time. Yah, musicians used to have a tough time during those days. After the band broke I joined the Harlem Swingsters in 1949. We had chaps like Gwigwi Mrwebi, Skip Phahlane, Ntemi Piliso, Randolph Tai Shomang, Norman Martin (if I’m not wrong) and Todd Matshikiza. Sadly, the majority of the guys are all dead. 166
Those olden days, you wouldn’t play in a band if you could not read music. Unlike today, where you just play. That’s why I don’t like today’s music. I don’t say I’m condemning it. I don’t say it is backward. In fat, some of today’s musicians are good. The trouble with them is that they are too commercial The talent scout tells them, ‘Don’t play jazz because the audience don’t like it.’ You understand what I’m trying to say? A year after I had joined the Harlem Swingsters, the band broke up. Really, there were no reasons, except for financial difficulties. In those days, big bands didn’t make sufficient money. Et those were the days of the best big bands in the country—Jazz Maniacs, Swingsters, Merry Blackbirds, Rhythm Clouds and African Hellenics. General Duze, Boykie Gwele and Mzala Lepere—I don’t know who was the drummer at that time—they made a quarter accompanying the Manhattan Brothers. Duze said I should come and join them soon after the Swingsters disbanded. I really enjoyed my long stay with The Manhattans (who were THE group at the time), as a member of the backing band called the Shantytown Sextet. Oh well, we did fine some way or the other with our accompaniment. I think the money was coming in okay—for me personally, and I got better money as we used to perform regularly, all over. Springs, Pretoria, Klerksdorp, Potchefstroom, Nigel and places like that. We went on playing and then the late saxophonist Mackay Davashe joined us. I think, in 1951. Then Davashe later became our leader. I don’t remember how. Dambuza Mdledle was also our leader at one time. 167
But when we went to Cape Town, we found ourselves stranded, though the Manhattans were a big name. We left for Langa location in Cape Town, playing to nearly empty halls. At one juncture, people started throwing stones on the roof of the hall while we were playing inside. Hey, it was terrible! The people of Langa said we were playing ‘nonsense’. Manhattan Brothers and all. They said we were playing the same kind of music the Manhattans always played. They wanted something new. A CHAP CALLED DOLLAR BRAND During that confusion, Todd Matshikiza disappeared from the cast! And that is how we got a replacement on piano, a chap called Dollar Brand, from District Six. I don’t know how they got Dollar Brand, only Dambuza. . .he came with Dollar while we were at a hostel staying in Langa, stranded. Dambuza came to me and asked me, ‘Do you know this guy?’ meaning Dollar. I replied, ‘Yah, this guy I know. . .I saw him once at Rio bioscope in Johannesburg, playing at a concert with me and Gene Williams who was leaving for Germany. Dollar was scared of us. He was kneeling down, virtually begging us, man, I’m telling you. This Dollar Brand—things do happen, ‘strue’s God. He wore big boots, looking like a skollie‐nyana so‐oo Kane the chap is a good musician. Hai, we took a train, the whole cast, to Port Elizabeth. 168
At that time nobody was aware that I had a lot of money with me then, because I used to sneak out every night to play at a certain nightclub. The chap who got me this private job is one of the finest guitarists we’ve ever had—Kenny Just. I got ten pounds a night—which was quite a lot at that time—and used to make it a point that the other guys shouldn’t know about this. When I ended my stint after a week, Kenny gave me a bottle of whisky and hotel remnants—chicken, sandwiches and things of that nature. That’s also when I started to be a buddy with Dollar. It was in P.E. that we made a departure in our music. We said ‘Now we are not going to play English music any more. We are going to play indigenous music—Xhosa, Sesotho and all that.’ Who came up with this idea? It was Davashe and Dambuza. You know what was the cause of all this? It is because of the reaction of the audiences in Cape Town where we didn’t have a following. So, we got a stoke somehow or the other, that no, man, this (English) music, people are bored with it and we’ll have to change it. Change we did, yah. We could read and write music but were doing it all by ear—quickly. You know, African music is easy, and we didn’t bother writing it down. All we did was to write down the keys; the melody line and tune, that’s all. Afterwards we would arrange it our own way. KING’S HOLIDAY 169
By the way, this show of ours was named ‘King’s Holiday’—by Dambuza—because we were then living like kings, enjoying life and eating the money. In East London, we played to packed houses for one and a half months. We stayed in that area for two months, having parties every night after the show! We had made about a thousand pounds which made us feel really good for the cost of living was still low at that time. Each member got sixty pounds as pocket money, but hey, when we went to Queenstown, none of us had a penny on himself. All we had were our train tickets. We had lived up to the name of the show—King’s Holiday. Dabuza came with all this idea, I’m tell you. Dollar was still with us. He was a small boy then, a ‘yes, sir’ boy. We stayed for about a week in Queenstown and spent all the money we had earned, and went back home broke. I’m telling: no penny, no provision. Dollar also returned to District Six. ‘MIRIAM—THAT GIRL HAD NO CURVES’ A week after we arrived from the Cape, we went to play in Springs, and the pay I got there was the first that I was able to give to my mother. Mzala Lepere played bass, Norman Martin returned to play drums and General Duze featured on guitar. Dambuza Mdledle, leader of the Manhattans, one day said: ‘Hey, gents, there is a girl who is singing with the Cuban Brothers. I don’t know how I can remove her from them. . . ‘ 170
That time, the only female singer with the Cuban Brothers was not known. She was nothing, man. She was just another girl who was trying to sing. ‘How can we get her? She is a good singer. . . ‘ Tapyt said, ‘I heard her singing at DOCC in Orlando East the other day!’ We coolly said, ‘Naw, man, just bribe her with some money. Call her to a corner and talk to her ma‐private. . .It does not matter even if you give her a pound. . .’ I don’t know how Dambuza solved that, but after a few days, we saw him come with this girl who was singing with the Cuban Brothers. Just like that. She had joined the Manhattan Brothers. Her name was Miriam Makeba. And it was with the Manhattans that she began to be noticed. To tell the truth, the Manhattans made Miriam famous. In those days, the Manhattans and Inkspots were the best groups. When I say Miriam was made famous by the Manhattans, I don’t mean they taught her to sing. . . As an individual. Miriam was shy and really scared of us. Oh, she was. . . Well, the three of us—me, Mackay Davashe and herself, we used to sit down and practice‐sometimes we would tell her how to use her voice; how to improve her vocal chords and all that jazz. And Miriam would listen attentively. Before she became the famous Miriam Makeba she is today. You know, I must admit, I never thought Miriam would become what she is now. What I mean is this; at Orlando township while she was with the Cuban Brothers, I though ‘Ag, she’ll never make it big.’ 171
I thought she would never make our standards—you know we regarded ourselves then as the big‐shots. We thought we were The Guys, if you understand what I’m trying to say. I regarded the Cuban Brothers and Miriam as small‐fry, let me put it that way. They were not bad, on the other hand, because they in fact started close harmonies in this country, based on the American group, the Modernnaires. To me, Miriam was just an ordinary girl—a novice. Ons was die ouens then—the real guys—thing of that nature. You’ll forgive me for my English. Miriam was not that attractive—I mean, curves and all that jazz. I think our first concert with Miriam was somewhere in the East Rand—singing negro spirituals, you know. But still, I was not yet impressed, maybe because I was so influenced by this Negro guy—
Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. Awright, we toured the Free State, Cape and Natal with Miriam. Before the show, Davashe and I would test her vocal chords, advising her here and there, and she would listen. Because during my schooldays I used to be a singer—yah. . . with Duze, we would tap‐
dance. My teacher, Mr. Ramokgopa, liked singing and he formed the group Lo‐Six. I came with a composition from the Chesa Ramblers band in Gemiston—boSipho, bo mang‐mang. Gange ya Germiston. Their song was Saduva. That later became our closing song in our concerts. Yah, at 4 am before playing the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’I Afrika, we would play Saduva when we’d know its chaile—closing time. It is this song Saduva which really gave Miriam a boost because at that time, Dolly Rathebe was the number one girl singer. 172
When Miriam got onto the stage with the Manhattans, singing this song, she got the crowds raving. In those days we dressed smart—the guys with suits and bowties and Miriam wearing long evening dresses. We played with her for a long time, until she left us and joined Alf Herbert’s African Jazz. She was by now involved romantically with Sonny Pillay, who himself was a good singer. THE COMING OF KING KONG Then came this guy Spike Glasser, a lecturer in music at the University of Cape Town. Kante all the time Todd Matshikiza was writing the score for a musical work he was performing with us. We were playing songs from the musical unawares—and I can remember well how we used to play the very overture from the musical—King Kong—at the Selbourne Hall. We were three then—
Todd, General and me, at variety concerts. Spike Glasser, came to us with his wife at Dorkay House, where we were all introduced. We were told he was from overseas and all that jazz. We didn’t know he was a local guy—you know we suffer from this complex that whenever a man is from overseas he’s the end in life. ‘There’s nothing better than a man from overseas! Ha! Ha! You know, daai gedagte—that kind of impression. Monna ga bare o tswa overseas ra mo sheba, man. Ra mo tshaba—when a man is from overseas we admire him. We go around in England, that guy. Musically‐speaking , the guy was there, if you know what I mean. He came with some musical scores—aga man, I was just a scrappikkie of 173
a laatie then. Wearning my ysterbaadjiie and my Hong Kong suite which was rather too tight on me. Awright, present were the usual Dorkay crowd—bo‐Mackay Davashe; Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, whom again? I think others like Todd Matshikiza and the late clarinetist Gwigwi Mrwebi. Then Glasser went away, returned some weeks later and chose me, Davashe and Sol to assist him to arrange the music of the King Kong show. We sat with Glasser for a coupla months—I think two months if I’m not wrong—arranging the score, at Dorkay. At times we would go to Glasser’s home in Orange Grove or Yeoville, spend some nights there. Or, go back home in the early hours of the morning at about three o’clock—with a bottle of whisky! This was to keep stimulating us, let me put it that way. First stage rehearsal! Miriam Makeba was one of the leading characters together with Dambuza Mdedle playing the part of King Kong himself. Really, I didn’t concentrate on the play which was by Harry Bloom. Glasser, a jolly guy, not pompous, was the musical director and Leon Gluckman was the director of the whole show. There I began to realize that this girl—Miriam—can sing! I said, haw—I nudged Davashe during one of the rehearsals, do you hear what I’m hearing, Mac? This girl! Huh! We performed for sometime with Miriam then poof!—she’s now up there. Our opening night of the show at the Wits Great Hall had been fantastic—Oh, God, the reception was wonderful, man. 174
I then realized that ‘heh, this Miriam Makeba—she’s so clever this cherrie. . . Klaar, klaar, she had recorded the song Lo‐Six, the one she had been singing with the Manhattans. We had some professional jealousy. We toured the Cape and Natal with the King Kong show—I think in Cape Town we played to mixed audiences. At the Great Hall I could not see the audience because I was in the orchestra’s pit. It was not very long after Miriam had left for America, Masekela followed also—before the show went to London Abigail Kubheka was Miriam’s under‐study—the script and the music. I went to London a month after the whole cast had left because I had been hospitalized after an assault. In London, I had to audition for my previous place in the orchestra! About a month after my arrival in London, something happened to my brain. I became berserk and had to be taken to a mental asylum in London—Ferreira Hospital. Hah, I had to leave the King Kong show. A substitute was found – a white guy took my place. I stayed for a month at the hospital. Then, one day one of the doctors took me to a concert in London where pianist Oscar Peterson and Trio were playing, including Ella Fitzgerald and her group. I sat there, you know (the doctor wanted me to find out whether I’m awright, because they suspected that I thought too much, musically, if you understand what I mean). They thought that my liking of music could have been one of the causes of my sudden illness that made me not to be quite normal. Okay, I went to that concert. Well, I was normal then, you know. . . But when Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown (on bass) and Ed Thigpen (on 175
drums) started playing there, I felt like standing and jumping, things of that nature. The doctor said, ‘Sit down, sit down, Kippie!’ Hey, this Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Second half, came Ella Fitzgerald and her group and the same thing happened. Ella was gone! With Herb Ellis (on guitar) and the other guys—one white and two negroes. I can’t remember their names. After the show, I got an autograph from Ella. And from there, the doctor said to me, ‘No Kippie, I think you’re still not awright. You’ll have to stay another two weeks in the hospital.’ After the two weeks, I was discharged, having been given treatment—like electric shock—three times. That thing can make you stupid, man. It makes you to become forgetful. Even now, I’m like that—forgetful. I have this tendency of forgetting things—I can hold a pen and forget where I have to put it. But the doctor said it would do me good. He told me that if one nerve in my brain snapped, I had had it and would eventually become insane, if I kept on thinking too much about music. He said electric shock treatment was the best for me. Afterwards, I went to this place—I forget it, man. . .Newport Hotel. . .there I met Jonas Gwangwa and the other cast members of King Kong. By the way, the doctor had told me not to booze, but all the same I drank though the doctor had said, ‘If you drink, you’ll die.’ BACK HOME 176
Those who returned to South Africa with me were Mackay Davashe and Abigail Kubheka, while several others remained in London I had to come back home because I could no longer stomach it in London. Oh well, a week after my arrival, I went t Dorkay House where Mr. Ian Bernhardt began to run musical shows for some of us there—including the late pianist, Gideon Nxumalo. We played at City Hall, Selbourne Hall and some nightclubs here and there. Gideon was just too fantastic! I mean, as a musician. I would say, he was a born musician, though he was much more into classic music, ya. But he was a master—he could read and write music well. He could handle that instrument of his! Oh yah, I remember so clearly now moments in what I believe was the best small band in the country—Jazz Epistles, featuring Dollar Brand on piano, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, Jonas Gwangwa on trombone, and Makhaya Ntshoko on drums, and me on alto saxophone I now recall ‘Scullery Department’, which I composed and recorded on our first album, Jazz Epistles Volume One. We were playing at a certain nightclub in Johannesburg. During a musical break, we were taken to the kitchen to have our meal. Yah, we sat down in that kitchen, eating. Then I said, ‘By right, you know Dollar, this is all nonsense—this idea of us being taken into the kitchen when there’s a break.’ I further said to the guys: ‘Are we kitchen “boys”. Aren’t we here to entertain the people? Aren’t we the “thing” here?’ Dollar replied in a soft and skollie‐like voice: ‘Ja, man, jy praat die waarheid ou pellie.’ 177
There and then I started to think of a song. . .to remember the kitchen incident by, but I didn’t think in terms of the word scullery. It was suggested by Dollar. He said, ‘Ja, ou pellie, ons kom nou en dan by die kombuis. . .the scullery department.’ And that’s how that song was born, because I said to the guys. ‘Yes, I should write a song called “Scullery Department”!’ After discussing this, we immediately called the son of the owner of the nightclub into the kitchen and told him: ‘Look here pellie, it is not good this thing of you bringing us into the kitchen for our meal. ‘You’d better see that we get our own table right there among the customers. We’re also important in this whole affair, you know? ‘In fact, we ARE the thing here! And do you know, if it were not for us, we’re telling you you’d have no business.’ ‘But you know chaps, my license,’ he replied. We answered back: ‘Your license? Why don’t they stop us playing in front of whites?’ After that, he went away—and set a table for us right among the customers! The Jazz Epistles was the best band I ever played in, here in South Africa. 178
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Chapter 13 Distric Six Boyhood by Richard Rive This is essentially a selective autobiography, since I have judiciously and purposefully selected the autobiographical material I am prepared to write about. I do not want to tell all, since I cannot tell all. Some incidents I have genuinely forgotten. Others I have glossed over. Still others are locked away in that private part of my world which belongs only to myself and perhaps one or two intimates. Many other incidents are too mundane and dreary to record. If, as I understand it, the autobiography is structurally the marriage between personal history and the novel, then I might ask the question what claim to history or literature my own particular life story has. Is my life then unique that it warrants an historical account of its own—
albeit selected? All lives are unique, and so many millions of others in South Africa and other countries have shared experiences as important or unimportant as mine. But these experiences which I describe are unique to me and to the way I respond to them and the way I articulate them. My life story could take different shapes and directions; for example the form and direction of one of the many shattered South African dreams. But then, is there anything left for any Black man’s dreams in Black Boy? In March 1979, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the conference of the African Literature Association of America, at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. I entitled my talk ‘The Ethics 180
of an Anti‐Jim Crow’. In it I posed the question whether any Black boy in South Africa could ever dream of being accepted in the land of his birth as a statesman or intellectual or creative artists in his own right. Could any Black boy dream f being part of the meaningful lawmaking processes in his own country? If any Black boy could, it certainly never occurred to me and my ragged friends running wild in the mean streets of Cape Town’s District Six. It never occurred to us at that stage what we were intended for anything better than what we experienced around us. I was born in March 1931, in Caledon Street just below St. Mark’s Church, which stands on windy Clifton Hill. When I refer to Caledon Street I have to use the past tense, since it has been wiped out by official decree. The streets of the District then sloped don perilously towards the harbour so that our street was lower than William Street but considerably higher than Hanover Street running parallel to it. Around us were squalid alleys, refuse‐filled streets and mean lanes called by such fancy names as Seven Steps, Horstley Street and Rotten Row. Under the Group Areas Act District Six has been reduced to a wasteland of broken bricks and rubble. A few years ago I was driving through the scarred landscape of what had been scenes of my childhood, Bloemhof Flats still remained and St. Mark’s Church stood dignified and defiant in its solitariness. My stone‐built primary school lay in ruins, and Star Bioscope had been bulldozed and so had the Globe Furnishers which gave its name to a notorious gang, and the Hanover Street Swimming Baths with its black, opaque water, and Velkes Wonder Shop and Maisels Bottle Store. Where were the crowded corners of Tennant Street where we played around lamp‐posts in the evenings with the southeaster howling around us? And Langman’s musty Indian store smelling of butterpits and masala powder? And the Fish and Chips shop with sawdust sprinkled on the floor and the plate‐glass windows steamed over with the cooking‐oil? All these have disappeared because mean little men have taken my past away. 181
My birth certificate says that my parentage is mixed; that is, that I come from Black and White stock. By official decree I have been variously labeled ‘Coloured’, ‘Non‐European’, and ‘Non‐White’. The first appellation is meaningless, since everyone is coloured. Some are coloured pink, others brown, others black. In the United States ‘Coloured’ means anyone who is not White. ‘Non‐European’ and ‘Non‐White’ are highly insulting labels. They imply that the persons described are negative entities, non‐somethings. It is as insulting as the term Non‐Black; or Non‐American to describe a Black citizen of that State, or Non‐Englishman to describe an Irishman in Camden Town. There must be few precedents in world history of an indigenous people being called by so negative an appellation. The term ‘Coloured’ I find as offensive in the South African context because it has hierarchic implications, implying inferior t Whites and superior to Blacks. When I was on the campus of a Black American college in the heart of Mississippi, I became involved in an animated discussion with some students about South African policy. At no time did I reveal my nationality. The students were in deadly earnest; their sentiments were so right and their facts so wrong. To drive home a point, I was forced to reveal the fact that I was a South African. ‘South African?’ said one student skeptically. ‘But you don’t look White.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t look Black either.’ ‘Dark brown,’ I replied. 182
‘Oh well,’ he said resignedly. ‘You must be one of those Coloureds they spell with a u.’ I was born of ‘mixed’ parentage, that much seems sure, but I am vague about my ancestry. I remember a mounted print which had pride of place on our dining‐room wall; it showed a man I later learnt was my maternal grandfather. He sported a cheesecutter and a droopy Dr. Crippen moustache and stood next to a racehorse he owned which had won the Metropolitan Handicap. He was unmistakably White. Blacks did not at that time own horses that won races. I must therefore conclude that my maternal grandmother must have been Black or Brown, as my mother was beautifully bronze. Little was ever mentioned about this grandmother other than that she came from the Klapmuts district. About my father and his family I know almost nothing. He died soon after I was born and was seldom mentioned in family circles. Perhaps a dark secret lurks somewhere. I once competed in some athletics competition, and watching was a very important Black American lady under a sunshade. When I had received my prize from her she remarked, ‘They can’t beat an American boy, can they?’ I have never been able to fathom what that meant, and I never bothered to ask. She was a family friend and knew my mother intimately. So possibly the Black strain came from my father and came from far over the Atlantic. I grew up in District Six in an atmosphere of shabbiness and deprivation at times. I remember, when I was three or four years old, running away from our tenement flat and wandering down Caledon Street, determined to explore my surroundings but frightened stiff. I stopped outside an impressive set of French doors which jutted out onto the pavement. A red light burned in the window in spite of the bright morning sun. I had stumbled by accident on the most exclusive brothel in our street, run by a tyrannical Madam called Mary Worse or Mary Sausages. I think she received her nickname because of her pronounced lips or pronounced buttocks or both. For 183
a long time she was the toughest, most generous and ugliest woman I had ever known. As I paused outside her establishment one of the girls spotted me and enticed me inside with a sugarstick. She was fair, I remember, with a rather worn, hard face. She smiled and called to the girls inside that there was a new customer. They all laughed and I could not understand this so began to cry and wanted to return home. She lifted me up and set me down next to her. While she painted her toenails, I told her about our family, how I could almost read, how my sister Georgie was pretty and had long hair, how my brother Douglas went to a large school in De Villiers Street, how my mother could bake tarts and yellow bread with raisins in it. She listened attentively and then showed me the butterflies tattooed on her legs and warned met hat they would fly away if one told lies. I did not believe her, because, in spite of what she was saying, they remained on her legs. Mary and the girls had a ritual every Christmas which I used to watch for many years while we lived in Caledon Street. Around 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, all the customers would be put out unceremoniously from the brothel, whether ill‐dressed local thugs, or Chinese seamen, or well‐groomed respectable pillars of our community who came surreptitiously, or down‐at‐heel White pimps who smuggled illicit liquor the house was closed for all ‘business’, the door thrown open and the red light switched off. Mary and the girls would wash, put on fresh make‐up and don their best dresses. Then, led by their redoubtable Madam (who, rumour had it, was the drum major of the Girls Brigade band in younger and more innocent days), they would march up Caledon Street in double file to attend midnight mass at St. Mark’s on the Hill. They would file self‐
consciously into their seats and cry throughout the service, especially when they felt that the references in the sermon were intended for them. By the time I was a teenager and sang in the church choir, the ritual was still going strong, and I would wink from our pews at any of the girls I knew, and they would reciprocate with wan, tear‐
184
stained smiles. After the service was over they would again fall into ranks outside the church and march down the street led by Mary. It was then open‐house at the brother for all who cared to come. Everything was freely available except sex. The Rector of St. Mark’s was invited, put in a brief appearance and said a few encouraging words. Wine flowed and there were plates heaped with chicken curry and yellow rice, boboties, jellies and custards. The radiogram blared ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ and ‘Hark, the Herald Angles Sing’. By noon on Christmas day it was all over. The guests shook hands and left, the mess was cleared up, and Mary and the girls went to bed and slept like logs for the rest of the day. Later that evening they roused themselves, drew the curtains and switched on the red light. It was business as usual for the rest of the year. It is notoriously easy to romanticize about slum life and sentimentalize it. In truth the slum was damp, dirty and dank. As children we ran around barefooted in patched clothes, howling at drunks and shouting obscene encouragement at bare‐chested street‐
fighters. Very rarely did the White world intrude into our area and when it did it was in the form of social workers bursting with compassion or priests bursting with righteousness, or policemen bursting with arrogance, strutting around in pairs and brazening it out with their hands always on their revolver holsters. I endured a harrowing childhood in District Six, where drunkenness, debauchery and police raids were the order of the day. I cannot find any reasonable objection to slum clearance, especially for the purpose of reconstructing decent homes to replace the former tenements. But when District Six was razed it was done so by official decree to make room for those who already had too much. Today, decades later, it has still not been built up. Those of us who had lived there before were shifted out unceremoniously and against our wills to the desolate sandy wastes of Manenberg and Heideveld, and a wind‐
185
swept area which with almost malicious sarcasm has been named Hanover Park. No White authority had every bothered to ask me whether they could take my past away. They simply brought in their bulldozers. When I went back recently I stood overlooking a wasteland on which trees and weeds were growing. I tried to reconstruct my childhood. I tried to estimate where our large tenement building, which housed over twelve family units, had stood. It was a huge, dirty‐grey, forbidding, double‐storied structure with a rickety wooden balcony that ran its entire length. There were three main entrances, numbered 201, 203 and 205. All faced Caledon Street. Behind it and much lower, running alongside, was a concrete enclosed area called The Big Yard into which all the occupants of the tenement threw their slops, refuse and dirty water. Below street level, and running under the building itself, was a warren of disused, gloomy rooms, the remains of a Turkish Bath complex; a carry‐over from the time when District Six was rich, White and Jewish. Our section was 201. The green skylight above the door was pockmarked with holes my brother Douglas had shot into the glass with his pellet gun. After you negotiated the first flight of steps, which were of smooth‐worn stone, you reached a wooden landing, where, as children, we would sit huddled in the artificial gloom, our thin jackets over our knees for warmth, and tell stories and reel off fantasies about characters in the District. Two sections ran off this floor, in one of which lived Mrs. Louw, who had a pronounced Semitic nose, purpled and veined from too much drinking. We called her Punch. It was rumoured that, although well into her fifties, she had a boyfriend who was not only decades younger than herself but was also a White man. In the other apartment downstairs lived Ta’Stienie, who was obese and vulgar, usually walked around barefooted in a tight dress sizes too small, and had half a dozen simian children from almost as many men. Up another flight of 186
rickety steps, wooden this time, you turned into pitch darkness. At the top of these was a tiny landing off which ran the two remaining apartments. One belonged to Aunt Becky and her husband. She had left her Dutch Reformed Mission Church because it was far too Afrikaans for her liking, unfashionable and working‐class. Now she was a pillar of St. Marks’s, which was at least Anglican. She also attended every Communist Party rally in the City Hall and dragged me along. In spite of her pronounced class consciousness she was an admirer of Comrade Bill Andrews, and would often repeat that she would ‘live a Communist and die a Communist’. The other apartment belonged to our family: my widowed mother, one unmarried sister, Georgina, and three brothers, David, Harold and Douglas. One brother, Arthur, had been found dead on Rondebosch Common. Another sister, Lucy, and a brother, Joseph, had married and fled the District as soon as possible. The remaining brothers slept in what we called The Boys’ Room. It was gloomy, shabby and always smelt of stale sweat. I ran away from the thirst three infant schools I was enrolled at. My objections, even at the age of five, were aesthetic. At the first school two girls wearing tartan pinafores and sporting long pigtails sat in front of me and cried all the time. I joined in the crying, and when the teacher was in an upstairs room having her tea, I ran home. At the second school we were made to stand in a queue while the teacher, who prided himself on being an amateur artist, drew whatever we requested on our slates. The girl in front of me asked for a mantelpiece, and this was drawn for her, complete with delicately balanced ornaments. I wanted the same drawing, but with my limited vocabulary asked for a house instead. So he drew a house for me; a cottage with smoke curling out of the chimney. I burst out crying, smashed my slate in front of him and ran home again. The third school was held in a converted garage and I objected because Douglas attended a school called Trafalgar Junior, which was housed in a proper building. This time I refused to return after the first day. I 187
remained at the fourth school, St. Mark’s, because I fell in love with my teacher, who was over‐powdered, hairy, and smelt of perfume. I grew up in an atmosphere of shabby respectability, in a family chafing against its social confinement to dirty, narrow streets in a beaten‐up neighbourhood. Our hankering after respectability became obsessive. We always felt we were intended for better things. The family spoke Afrikaans, but as the youngest I was spoken to in English. We were members of the Anglican Church. I wore shoes to school, a mark of great social distinction. And when in my loneliness I befriended the local guttersnipes, ‘you skollie friends’ as they were called when I accepted Tana, Soelie and Braim as bosom companions, and Honger, who didn’t know who his parents were and slept on the cold, wet cement floor of the Mokkies Buildings in Tennant Street—
when we used to sit in darkened doorways, and our silence was full of the hopelessness of our lives—I knew that discovery by my socially insecure family was fraught with danger. I suffered all the uncertainties of pseudo‐respectability. As a child I was never strongly rebellious and acquiesced fairly easily. I joined a church choir and chanted the responses dressed in a cassock, surplice and scratchy Eton collar. I left the church Lads Brigade and joined the Second Cape Town Boy Scout Troop, because marching through the streets behind a blaring, tinny band could damage the image we tried to create. But it was financially difficult to break with our surroundings and so we remained, the family diminishing as members married and left. At twelve I won a competitive Municipal Scholarship which allowed me to proceed to High School to do subjects with a ring about them such as Latin, Mathematics and Physical Science. Although the White world seldom put in an appearance in District Six, we occasionally ventured out. These sorties were often hazardous and dangerous. 188
I remember how my ragamuffin friends and I, bewitched by the lights and music of a Whites‐only amusement park at the bottom of Adderley Street cautiously advanced into it only to be chased out by a red‐faced policeman. I remember the vice squad raiding all the houses in Caledon Street for illicit liquor, and the huge, scarred detective in char e who poked through our wardrobes with a skewer. And my eldest brother, Joey, marching off to war in the ranks of his segregated Cape Coloured Corps in order to free Ethiopia. And the man whom newspapers later hailed as one of Cape Town’s most progressive City Councillors, who phoned the police to chase us off Green Point Track because we dare to practice our athletics on the amenity reserved for whites. My entry into sport was also traumatic. In the usual rowdy street games I was bigger, stronger and faster than my peers. Large‐limbed and tall for my age, I had a distinct advantage over the other slum urchins. During school vacations social workers, both White and Black, would invade us and smother us with love, goodwill and dripping‐wet charity. They would assemble us on the nearest stony vacant lot, hand out second‐hand bats and balls, and watch us whooping and desporting, their eyes tinged with pity and understanding. We masked our resentment but deliberately and calculatedly shocked them by hurling invectives at one another and discussing sexual details as loudly as possible. We would side‐spy them for any reactions And indeed soon enough these would come. Raised eyebrows and sympathetic clicking of tongues. Like so man charity peddlers they did not lack sincerity, as if that were enough. We longed for understanding non condescension; for love not patronization. And when these were not forthcoming we bit the charitable hand that fed us. I soon became a favourite with them. I 189
was an excellent athlete, fairly docile, and, what amazed, already I spoke English more fluently than most of them. These activities usually ended in a gigantic sports meeting at Green Point. Shouting, laughing and hurling obscenities, we would be carted off to the track to compete against other ragamuffins from Gympie Street, Dry‐Docks and Bo‐Kaap. I gave away my prizes of ludo sets, cheap torches and glass ashtrays to save embarrassing explanations at home. Once I was older I joined an exclusive, upper‐class ‘Coloured’ athletics club. At first the members, all fair‐skinned, were worried about my dark complexion, but relented because not only was I a mere junior but I attended Trafalgar High School. The evening I joined, the club experienced a crisis. A young man wished to become a member whose hair texture, yellow complexion, high cheekbones, poor education and guttural Afrikaans accent socially disqualified him. Most of the seniors resigned in protest against having to mix with him socially. As juniors we were out of all this. And when we trained together afterwards in the twilight of a Green Point evening on the special day set aside for ‘Coloureds’, with the smell of cinder and embrocation in our nostrils, it was only ourselves, a handful of innocent teenagers, who were prepared to warm‐up with him. I remember the flaming torches carried by hard‐faced Black men marching past Castle Bridge in protest against the Segregation Bill. I also remember the first job I ever applied for. When I was asked to come for an interview because my mathematics marks were exceptionally high, an embarrassed employment officer drew me aside and apologized because the job was for Whites only. And the White manager of a clothing‐factory in Searle Street who guffawed when I meekly indicated that I wished to be employed as a clerk. 190
And the unemployment queue in Barrack Street. After shuffling to the front I was told that with a Senior Certificate I was overqualified for any work they could offer a Black. A superficial observer will see a slum merely as a breeding‐place for crime and lawlessness. This is understandable because the slum has a sort of anonymity about it. A slum is where they live. They not only look alike, they also behave alike. But those who are forced to live in a slum know that the uniformity is superficial. There is also a rough ethical system at work, of acceptance or rejection. In a slum set aside for Blacks, Jim Crow is vitally important. You either accept it or reject it, how to feint, how to dodge, how to mask your resentment, how to insulate yourself against hurt by laughing too loudly or shouting too wildly. You learn that the difference between colour discrimination and any other form is that colour discrimination is observable. In the slum you can blend into the background and seek anonymity in the mass whenever the pressure becomes too much. You become indistinguishable from the others, by Whites. But amongst yourselves you are not invisible, you are not fused with others, because the slum paradoxically also teaches you to guard your individuality. When Whites are around, you drop it as a protective device, but amongst yourselves you stake your claim to be different because you are different. Beneath your black skin beats a different heart. And your anti‐Jim Crow stance starts with the first dangerous thoughts and questions about that harsh, cold, White world outside. And you approach it not as a subservient and a menial but as an equal bent on answers. And this period is the most dangerous not only because of the questions but because of the answers. You are now fully prepared to adopt the ethics of an anti‐Jim Crow. 191
Chapter 14 Notes From A Quiet Backwater 192
by Bessie Head There must be many people like me in South Africa whose birth or beginnings are filled with calamity and disaster, the sort of person who is the skeleton in the cupboard or the dark and fearful secret swept under the carpet. The circumstances of my birth seemed to make it necessary to obliterate all traces of a family history. I have not a single known relative on earth, no long and ancient family tree to refer to, no links with heredity or a sense of having inherited a temperament, a certain emotional instability or the shape of a fingernail from a grandmother or a great‐grandmother. I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself. I was born on July 6, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg mental hospital. The reason for my peculiar birthplace was that my mother was white and my father black. No details were ever available about my father beyond the fact that he worked in the family stables and took care f their racehorses. A great deal became known to me about my mother when I was thirteen. At birth I had been handed to a Coloured foster mother to whom I became deeply attached and accepted as my mother. She was paid a pittance of three pounds a month to care for me. 193
There was sly, secret supervision of my life, which was unknown to me. Each month a social security worker turned up with a notebook to jot down notes and records of my day‐to‐day existence. When I was thirteen the foster mother fell into a state of abject poverty and a decision was made to transfer me to a mission orphanage in Durban. Problems arose when the school holidays came round. I was called to the office of the principal, a British missionary, who announced curtly: ‘You are not going back to that woman. She is not your mother.’ A teacher found me lying prostrate and at the point of collapse under a bush in the school garden. On asking what was the matter, I told her I was about to die as no one would let me go home to my mother. Thereupon the principal bundled me into her car and for some strange reason raced straight to the Durban Magistrate’s Court where a magistrate read something out to me in a quick gabble that I did not hear or understand. But he looked at me accusingly as though I were some criminal and said, hostilely: ‘Your mother was a white woman, do you hear?’ On arriving back at the mission, the missionary opened a large file and looked at me with a wild horror and said: ‘Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.’ 194
The lady seemed completely unaware of the appalling cruelty of her words. But for years and years after that I harboured a terrible and blind hatred for the missionaries and the Christianity which they represented, and once I left the mission I never set foot in a Christian church again. But it was also the lady’s delight whenever she had a problem with me to open that file and read out bits of it. So I gained a hazy impression of my beginnings, of a pathetic letter written by my mother in the mental hospital, stipulating that above all things, it was her earnest desire that I receive an education, of a period of emotional instability and depression in her life that had led her to inflict a terrible disaster on herself. She had been married and when the marriage fell through she returned to the family home. In a sudden and quite unpredictable way she decided to seek some love and warmth from a black man. But the family belonged to the top racehorse owning strata of South African society. The family home was Johannesburg and it was necessary for them to hide their skeleton in the cupboard far away from home. She never came out of the mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg and died there in 1943. In contrast to all this I fear any biographers would be bored to tears by my own life story. There are truly no skeletons in my cupboard or dark secrets swept under the carpet; no real sensation or scandal has ever touched my life and I look back on myself as a personality, plain and ordinary, without any glamour or mystery. 195
Chapter 15 Return To Johannesburg by Ellen Kuzwayo I gradually settled down at number 1092/2/3 Merafe Street, Pimbille, the house of my father, Phillip Serasengwe Merafe. My father had been a student under his father‐in‐law, Jeremiah Mokoloi Makgothi, in Thaba’Nchu in the Orange Free State. After finishing his preliminary education in Thaba’Nchu, he went to Lovedale Institution, where he qualified as one of the first black printers. He worked at Mr. Tlale’s Printing Press Moshochonono at Maseru in Lesotho. Later, he worked for a short time for the Bantu World press in Johannesburg and finally went into business as a general dealer at Pimville. As I have described, he became a champion of civic work in Johannesburg, under the Advisory Boards of the 1930s. 196
Pimville, in 1947, was by and large a slum, like all the other black areas round the cities and towns of South Africa. In those years Pimville was notorious for its ‘tank’ houses (Nissen huts, made of corrugated iron) and as a result the area was known as ‘Ditankeng’, since these houses looked like faceless, tail‐less elephants, in height, width and breadth. They were also the size of a fully grown elephant: these were family dwellings, not single quarters, and served as kitchen, dining‐room, sitting and bedrooms, as well as bathroom. All these houses (if my memory serves me well) were built below the railway lines, as temporary shelters for the Johannesburg black labour pool. They were fully demolished forty years after their erection—this is how temporary they became! Merafe Street was the first street east of the railway line in Pimville. Except for a few decent houses‐like the Nthongoas’ and the Nkomos’ next door—most looked dilapidated from overcrowding. One was called ‘House Basoabile’, which means ‘They are disappointed’ (by the owner’s achievements, I suppose). Next door to each other on Merafe Street were two houses owned by my father. His shop was on the corner, next to the houses. Pimville Station was two minutes’ walk away. These two houses were brick‐built and finished with a cement rendering. All the rooms in both houses had properly finished ceilings and the floors were of concrete covered with linoleum. One of the houses was rented; the other, in which we lived, was furnished in good taste. Although the rooms were comparatively small, the home was comfortable by the standards of those years. The very poor houses in Merafe Street were rented to migrant labourers, most of whom came from Lesotho. Their ‘town wives’ were seasoned ‘illicit’ liquor traders, and used large quantities of water for cleaning and washing their laundry as well as the pots in which they made liquor. This dirty water was generally emptied into the street, which, neither graveled nor tarred, was perpetually 197
muddy with pools of stagnant water. As there were no drains to collect this dirty water, the street could stink at times. The ‘bucket system’ of sewerage was used in Pimville until the late 1970s when a water‐borne sewerage system was built. Considering the fact that Pimville was established early in the century—say round about 1918—that community was using the bucket system for at least 60 years, yet they survived any possible epidemics. It was very uncomfortable, even nauseating, to inhale the smell from the buckets lined up on every street throughout Pimville, before they were collected to be disposed of at a nearby farm, commonly known to the residents as ‘Kwa spensel’. The sight of the buckets was very painful to both the eye and to the inner feelings of the residents. We used to tease my father, as a Chief ‘Sisunda’ on the Advisory Board (‘Sisunda’ is equal to Chief Councillor), about the filth and squalor in Merafe Street where the Chief himself lived. Come to think of it, Father took such jokes well—although, more often than not, they were truths much more than jokes. It was to this community that I returned brow‐beaten, helpless and lost—but certainly not having lost the fighting spirit which has been my second nature since I have been aware of the world around me. For as long as I remember, I have hated being a burden to anybody, or letting myself be treated as worthless by anybody. It was a very strange time, now that I look back. Strange, because when I came back from Saulspoort and needed someone to help me out, I did not feel free, in this new home, to seek the help I needed. It was a ‘new’ home because the first time I had come here was when I was on holiday and did not need anything from anyone. My father bought me clothing as a present, not out of need, on that occasion. This time I was next to naked and deeply appreciated the shoes and clothing my father bought me, simple and inexpensive as they may have seemed then. 198
Without blowing my own horn, I had always been a very industrious girl. With my mother, I could not have been otherwise. I soon realized afresh that my step‐mother was a very industrious and particular person too. Her house was spotless. She was also a very good cook. From what I had seen of her during my short visits, I knew she was someone I could live with. I reminded myself that my role in this household was that of a child. My mother’s words reinforced my thoughts: ‘Remember if you should ever be in your father’s house one day, give your mother in that home the same respect and recognition you would accord me.’ Among the duties I assigned myself was to get up and clean my own bedroom and the living rooms before my parents awoke. I left the kitchen to the home‐
help. Within two weeks this had become routine. It was within these first two weeks too that I decided to find a job. The few friends I had in Pimville, some of them teachers, had indicated that there were no teaching vacancies locally. When I discussed the possibility of going to Orlando East to try my luck in the schools there, they agreed that this might be a good idea. If my memory serves me well, it was on Monday, 3 March 1947, that I boarded a local train at about 7:30 a.m. But for some reason I can never explain, I passed Orlando Station and alighted at Mlamlankunzi, where I was greeted by the sight of a number of schools, all within a relatively small area. For a moment I stopped, held my breath and seriously debated on which school to go to first: a very difficult decision for a complete stranger to make. There were about two schools to my immediate right, one further on from the two, and two more facing me. Something inside me said, ‘Walk straight on, Ellen.’ I did just that and walked through the school gate facing me. I cannot say why I preferred this particular school. I passed the one on the left and went into the one on the right. 199
It was now about 9:00 a.m., and a light‐complexioned gentleman was standing in the yard. He was a man of medium height and slight build. He was certainly not impressed by my appearance—perhaps he took me for a parent of one of the pupils. He introduced himself and I did the same, adding that I wished to see the headmaster. Without inviting me inside, he said, with a puzzled look on his face, ‘What do you want to see the headmaster about? Perhaps I can help.’ Rather apologetically, I told him that I was a school teacher by profession, I came from Rustenburg, had come to settle in Johannesburg and that I badly needed a job. Still looking doubtful as if in need of an explanation for my appearance, he finally said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Moloto, this is a very strange and rare coincidence. On Friday afternoon one of my teachers left for home without saying a word. This morning she sends me a letter of resignation without any warning, or even as much as serving a week’s notice.’ He turned and faced one of the classroom doors behind him saying: ‘You hear those children making that noise there? That is the class left by the teacher I am referring to.’ As a matter of form I responded, ‘It is rather disturbing for a professional person to act so unprofessionally in her job.’ Deep down in my heart I would have given anything to get her job. He then wanted to know if I knew any teachers in the neighbouring schools who could act as referees for me. He told me that the school next door was Orlando High, that the headmaster there was Mr. Godfrey Nakene and, among the staff he mentioned Mr. Randall Peteni. I immediately told him that I used to know Mr. Nakene and Mr. Peteni, but added that I did not think they would remember me as I had last seen them several years before. His face brightened and he said, ‘Wait for me here, I am coming back’, then he rushed towards Orlando High School, jumped a fence and vanished into the building, leaving me there in a state of great anxiety. After what felt like hours of waiting he came back and now invited me into his office. There he told me of the very favourable response he had received from both Mr. Nakene and Mr. Peteni about my 200
performance as a teacher. ‘Mrs. Moloto, they both say, if I lose you, I lose a jewel in the teaching field,’ he ended. There was, however, no doubt in my mind that the headmaster of Law Palmer Primary School—his name was Mr. Mokale—was finding it very difficult to reconcile this ‘jewel in the teaching field’ with the woman who stood in front of him I vowed to demonstrate to him that appearance are not always the best yardstick to determine someone’s worth at work. He desperately needed a teacher at that moment and I was the only person available to take over the class, who were now shouting at the top of their voices. ‘Mrs. Moloto,’ he said, ‘Let’s go into the classroom.’ I stood awkwardly before the children as he introduced me. It was very clear the children were not in the least impressed by me. After reprimanding the class for making so much noise, he firmly told them to behave. The, appointing one pupil to keep order, he invited me to follow him into his office, where he gave me the class register, a timetable and a few textbooks. I then returned to the class. I had hardly been with the class for five minutes when the bell for break rang, and the pupils flew out of the classroom, as if grateful to get away from this stranger, their new class teacher. After putting the record books in their place, I glanced through the window only to see a very smart group of teachers, both male and female. The women were very attractively dressed, as was usual. I didn’t know whether to remain in the classroom or join the rest of the staff. Embarrassment was about to get the better of me when a vivacious sprightly teacher walked in. She seemed unconcerned by my appearance and shook hands, saying in a very friendly tone, ‘Welcome to Law Palmer. Come and join us. I am Caroline Ramalebye.’ In a more subdued tone I introduced myself: ‘Ellen Moloto, Mrs. Moloto.’ I was acutely aware of my shabby appearance as I followed her to join the group of very lively teachers, chatting and laughing on the verandah. I shook hands with all of them and we exchanged names. 201
As we had nothing in common to talk about, I listened to their conversation, but without really assimilating the content. I would have given any excuse to get away, but I lacked the courage to do so. When the bell finally rang I could have shouted ‘hurrah’. Among the group, there was one woman who was not like the rest of the staff. In fact, she was not very different from me in appearance as far as I could see. At the end of the school day, she told me she had only been at the school a week and that she came from the Cape. We both shared our hard‐luck stories. I had a lot in common with Ms. Leila Mthimkulu as regards our immediate past family life, but we were poles apart so far as our outlook towards life was concerned. Within the first two weeks, I found myself drawn towards the sophisticated, vivacious Caroline Ramalebye as my companion. The difference in our appearance did not act as a barrier between us. Caroline, now Mrs. Caswell, had, and still has, a very strong personality, and with Mrs. Gladys Molestane, born Mathabathe, another teacher at this school, had a marked influence in the school. Except for Mr. Mashala, the carpentry instructor who lived in Kliptown, all the staff members lived locally and did not have to commute between home and school. It was for this reason that, after school, we went our separate ways and I saw very little of them outside school hours. I occasionally traveled home by train with Mr. Mashala. At the end of two months, things changed drastically for me when I joined my uncle’s family in Orlando. The move meant that I could live more cheaply because I could walk to work; but the change brought many other blessings as well as hardships with it. I lived more or less in the same neighbourhood as Leila and I found myself in her company more often than not, particularly on our way back 202
home. It was in her company that I first made contact with the local shopkeepers in Orlando. Now that I lived away from home, I missed the opportunity of using my father’s contacts for purchasing the goods I needed, and as a stranger in Johannesburg, this was a real need for me—a situation which the established residents of this city may find funny or not real. Through Leila, I was introduced to the local traders, and thus perhaps appeared as a more respectable citizen of their community. Through this new network of contacts I was able to put myself on a par with my colleagues in my dress, and so gained self‐confidence and dignity and became independent in my own right, as a person. By the end of 1947 I was an integrated member of the staff at Law Palmer Higher Primary School. Besides my regular classroom duties, my assignments included training the senior school team in basketball, conducting the senior girls’ choir for music competitions, running the Girl Guides and supervising groups of pupils assigned to clean the school premises. Later, some of my colleagues shared with me the private impressions they had had about me when I first joined the staff. It was great fun and very revealing to get an honest assessment. I knew then I had made it in that school. I remained there for six years. It was from there that I brought home the ‘Girls Choir Trophy’, as conductor of the district music competition. Not far from our school, just outside the nearest railway station, Mlamlankunzi, stood a reformatory for delinquent boys whose offences varied in degree of severity. Their ages ranged from twelve to eighteen years. Apart from Law Palmer, all the other schools in that neighbourhood refused to take any of them. For as long as I taught at this school, I shared this rare responsibility with the rest of my colleagues, and became very concerned about and attached to these boys. This concern and interest opened a new direction in my life. The boys were a challenge to all of us, including the headmaster. I was drawn closer to them when, in my second year in that school, I 203
was assigned to teach some subjects in standards 5 and 6, where most of these boys were pupils. My direct contact with them helped me to get to know them as people with weaknesses and strengths. Some of them were very lovable and intelligent. There was no doubt that some who had landed in this institution were victims of circumstances. The fact that some were children from broken homes increased my concern for my own sons, particularly after my divorce. In the struggle to settle down after the shocking experience of my marriage, I immersed myself in some of the events taking place in my community, such as youth work, training and running youth clubs in Pimville and Orlando. This occupied me in the afternoons after school when there were no extra‐mural activities. Later in the year, my interest turned to the youth section of the African National Congress. The ANC Youth League had been launched in 1943, four years before my return to Johannesburg. The leaders of this movement, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, were young black radicals who saw the ANC as a n organization of the black elite. Their aspirations were to produce a mass grass‐roots organization. I remember the glamorous Nelson Mandela of those years. The beautiful white silk scarf he wore round his neck stands out in my mind to this day. Walter Max Sisulu, on the other hand, was a hardy, down‐to‐earth man with practical clothing—typically a heavy coat and stout boots. Looking back, the third member of their tri, Oliver Tambo, acted as something of a balance, with his middle‐of‐the‐road clothes! Most of my leisure‐time in the evening was spent n that. I worked very closely with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, as well as Peter Mila and Herbert Ramokgopa. I wish I could explain why there seemed to be no outstanding women in the ranks of the ANC movement at that time. If they were present, for some reason or another I missed them. I heard of Ida Mtwana but I did not meet her to work with her. I regret that to this day. 204
My involvement in the community as a teacher and a community worker brought me in contact with many people, and as a result, my circle of contacts and friends grew by the day. I specially valued and appreciated some of the dear friends with whom I could share the tormenting experience of being separated from my children as well as the uncertainty about the outcome of my marriage. I became active in the church, at school and in recreational programmes to keep from pining. Towards the end of 1947, I got a rude shock when I received a summons to appear in court to show cause why my marriage to my husband, Mr. Ernest Moloto, should not be terminated on grounds of desertion. Much as I had anticipated that my departure from Rustenburg might possibly end in this way, the receipt of the summons really shook me. This was my first experience of coming face to face with a lawsuit of any kind. I was at a loss what to do and turned to my father for guidance. After receiving legal advice, as Father suggested, I adjusted my mind to appearing in court, the thought of which really troubled me. I could not bear the thought of going to court to expose our family life differences in public, much as I was very hurt and humiliated by my husband’s treatment of me. Do not be fooled; it angered me more than words can tell. I found the support of some of my closest friends invaluable during this time. Among these few friends was Dr. Mar Xakana, whom I had first met when I was at Lovedale and she at Fort Hare University. She was a woman of very few words, yet in her silence she communicated care, warmth, support and silent concern. I found her a true friend, and so she has remained. The continued communication with my father and with one or two friends I trusted soothed my fears about this trying, challenging ‘monster’, divorce. I instructed my legal adviser—a white lawyer, for there were no African lawyers at that time—to arrange for an out‐of‐court settlement with my husband, for in spite of all the hurt and 205
humiliation I had suffered at his hands I was determined never to wash my dirty linen in public. This I am glad I succeeded in avoiding. When the day arrived, I found that I had sufficient courage to stand firm in my approach. The only setback was that my legal representative was a totally different person from the man I had spoken to previously when I visited my lawyer’s office. Not that I wanted that particular lawyer, but this representative had a completely different make‐up and composition—in his physical appearance and disposition, as well as his attire. The man I was relying on to carry me through this experience was tiny in stature, and timid and apologetic in manner and approach. His attire, in particular his trousers, was shabby, dirt and creased. The gown he wore redeemed him to a certain extent, but it was also just not up to the mark. I looked at him once, and immediately lost confidence in him. I there and then told myself, ‘Ellen, take charge of this boat, whether you sink or swim.’ After he had asked my husband and his legal adviser to join us, I gave him no chance. I addressed myself directly to my husband’s lawyer, a tall, handsome, neatly dressed gentleman with a very strong personality, and open and forthright in his approach. But I refused to allow him to intimidate me in any way. I stepped forward and introduced myself as Mrs. Ellen Moloto. My dear father, who had accompanied me to court, appeared nervous at that stage. He must have seen my disillusionment in my legal adviser, and was torn between me, his loving daughter, and the representative of the firm of lawyers he had introduced me to and had spoken so highly of. My husband, who expected us to fight it out in court, must have been perplexed and completely putout by the developments of those few minutes. On the other hand, I was determined to have it my own way and to carry out my intentions 206
In a few words I told his lawyer that it was my wish not to go into court but, if possible, to settle our dispute outside court. The only demand I made was that, when my husband had got the divorce he wanted, I must have free access to see my sons at any time convenient to me, and that the court should protect me from any abuse by my husband when I went to see my sons. At that stage I read in my husband’s lawyer’s face a great deal of surprise and a desire for more explanation. My own lawyer stood there quite dumb. Continuing to address myself directly to y husband’s lawyer, I told him that the only people who knew the whole truth about our differences were myself and my husband. Directing my eyes to my husband, but still addressing his lawyer, I emphasized that he, my husband, and I truly knew the painful experience we had gone through and that I had no intention of going into court to disclose publicly the shocking, hurting and embarrassing experiences I had suffered at my husband’s hands. On that note I continued to plead for a settlement out of court on the condition that I had free access to see my sons if and when it was convenient to me. The lawyer turned to my husband for his reaction and pointed out the constructive importance of my offer. My husband, who I suspect had expected a great deal of resistance from my side, was left with no alternative but to accept it. I later learned that the carload of relatives he had brought as witnesses were both deflated and disappointed. As he moved away from us towards the court building, his lawyer called me aside and this is what he said to me: ‘Mrs. Moloto, in my practice as a lawyer, I have not come across many women who made this type of decision. You may not trust me because I represent your husband, but this one thing I wish to say; you have made an unexpected, wise decision. Although our husband may decide to hold on to the children, this must not disturb you. My experience in 207
this practice is that the parents who force the children to remain with them and deny them the opportunity to see the other parent stand the greatest chance of being rejected and deserted by those same children when they grow older. Mark my words.’ And on that note we parted. The divorce was granted. As truly as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, in 1957 I saw my eldest son walk into my new home at 11376 Orlando West Extension, Soweto, and six or seven years later his brother followed. They are now married and settled with their families. My elder son is in Soweto, the younger one at Umlazi in Durban. The pit of it all is that I was not able to see the gallant lawyer to say to him: Yes it happened as you predicted. With my divorce behind me, I felt that a heavy load was removed from my shoulders. I started to plan my life all over again. I told myself, ‘Ellen, you tried your very best and it was not good enough. You cannot moan over what happened; your duty is to stand up and live your life to the fullest.’ Side by side with this feeling of being free from a marriage which lasted only six year, I was left as if empty—
the type of feeling one has after working very hard for a stiff examination. Once that examination is over there is a sudden empty feeling, as if something is missing. For two or three months I was caught up in this uncomfortable feeling of emptiness. The longing for my sons doubled. I suddenly felt very distant from them as if I would never ever see them again. I suppose the marriage link which was snapped when we divorced had a psychological effect on me. My ears, eyes and mind were very alert to register the challenging, interesting happenings round about me at that time. I was determined to keep myself occupied without realizing that I was really trying to blot out my past experiences. 208
Round about that period, word got round that a certain overseas film company wanted potential actors and actresses to come forward for auditions. Without wasting time I presented myself at the studio—I cannot remember now which one—in the city. Other black men and women, some of my age, some younger, some older, arrived in large numbers. I found the audition unnerving, yet very exciting. The director, Zoltan Korda, was a very interesting person. On arrival we introduced ourselves, but were not given anything special to do. Korda had a remarkable memory for people’s names, for out of the blue he called my name. I turned to him and he smiled. Our communication was without any words, yet I knew I must have made a mark. It was fascinating watching proceedings throughout the auditioning. I remember how Winnie Ramatlo and I competed for the part of a Skokian Queen. I was finally chosen to play the part and Winnie was my understudy. The film was Cry the Beloved Country based on the famous novel by Alan Paton. The film absorbed me completely—physically, intellectually and emotionally. Acting in the film helped me to discover my untapped potential and, unknowingly, it became a great healer of the hurt I had recently incurred. The possibility of going abroad for the first time was raised, although not fulfilled. Winnie Ramatlo, Albertina Temba (the lady playing the leading role in the film) and I were a threesome from the Youth Club Association. We made a mark for ourselves, for the youth clubs and, above all, for black womanhood. Looking back, I have every reason to believe that if we had known better about the benefits and implications of filming then we could have made a better financial deal. But as a section of the population which had been exploited over the years, the lump sums we received were accepted with pleasure and excitement, for they were a great financial reward compared with our salaries. 209
What is more, we saw ourselves as actors of standing and reputation for we shared the set with famous personalities of Sidney Poitier’s caliber. I personally enjoyed working with him directly, for he played the young priest who entered my Skokian Queen’s house—a house where there existed every vice and vile practice. One actress who had great potential, but who for one reason or another did not fulfill her opportunity to the fullest, was Ribbon Dlamini. If my memory serves me well, we were engaged in this film on and off from some time in 1949 to some time in 1951. It was during the years 1948 and 1949 that in my numerous movements and engagements I met Mr. Godfrey Rosenbaum Kuzwayo, a man in his early forties. There was no doubt in my mind from my first meeting with him that he was a man of character and great experience and achievements, but that he had had his share of hardship and misfortune. He was a refined, soft‐spoken gentleman, with a rare sense of humour. He told me that he had been very active in the Church as the Treasurer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa, but he had lost interest in this work because of the disparity in the wages of the ministers of his Church who were serving the towns and those who were stationed in the country. This issue was very close to his heart. He felt that the ministers stationed in the country who were receiving very low wages were exposed to a great deal of suffering, while those in town were reasonably comfortably settled and protected. G.R., as he was popularly known, was a compositor in the printing trade. I found out later that he had his own business in the city registered as ‘Africans’ Own’. Later he was compelled to sell this printing shop against his will, following the implementation of the Group Areas Act which denied black people the right to trade within the city of Johannesburg. His sense of humour and commitment to duty reduced some of the pressures and frustrations he was going 210
through at that time, some of which were personal and linked with his private life, while others were much more of a business nature. We shared each other’s problems over a period of nine to twelve months. His problems certainly weighed very heavily on him. I got to know more about his past successes and his prospects of a very bright future. And I also learned from some of his close friends, both women and men, about some of the issues which contributed to his present situation. When his family life completely disintegrated and he asked for my hand in marriage, I was scared, and turned down his proposal. I feared to take responsibility in that type of situation again; perhaps also I was still enjoying the few years of freedom after my first marriage. However, he persisted, and some time in 1950 I reconsidered my decision. Two main issues influenced me in accepting his proposal. My childhood longing for a home I could see and refer to as mine, even if I shared it with someone, was still unfulfilled, and remained a burning issue within me. Secondly, I had never at any stage accepted failure and allowed it to remain unchallenged. The failure of my first marriage inside six years was a very sore point in my life. I had tried to reflect on this matter very objectively and with an open mind to see what had really gone wrong, and, more than that, where I had personally erred. G.R.’s proposal would give me the chance to test my capability in this field again, and so I accepted. We married in 1950 and decided to start a home in Kliptown because of the shortage of houses in Soweto at that time. We found accommodation in a neighbourhood known as Paardevlei. The houses were reasonable well built and finished, constructed s three‐
bedroom cottages joined together into ten to twelve units. They shared a common set of toilets built outside the cottages, which were a real hazard. The tenants were a mixture of coloureds, Indians and 211
Africans, under an Indian landlord. The problem of relations between the race groups was non‐existent. You chose whom you wished to associate with and the level to which such an association was carried. One thing was certain: we were a community with a spirit of neighbourliness which accorded respect and recognition where it was due. Our marriage was blessed with the birth of a son, Godfrey Ndabezitha Kuzwayo. This gave me three sons in all. My husband had one daughter by his first marriage so we could boast of one daughter and three sons. For a long time, even after my second marriage, I shut thoughts of my earlier married life out of my mind. The only time I ever came near facing it with some maturity was on one of my visits to see my sons, when I shared with my ex‐husband my concern for our children, particularly in view of the fact that he was not prepared to part with them. I expressed my concern to him about the boys, and emphasized to him the importance of their being happy for the sake of their general growth and well‐being. To me one very important aspect was that his new wife should be happy and comfortable, as I saw this as the only guarantee that the children would remain happy and secure. To bring it home to him, I shared with him my deep‐felt wishes for the very best for both of our new homes, for the benefit of our two boys, regardless of where they were at that time. Even though my own sons were not living with me, I felt totally committed to having a happy home for my second husband’s children who did live with us and, I deeply hoped, for my own children when they came to visit or to live with us. The fact that I was reasonably settled in my new home meant that I was able to make my family happy. Ernest’s unexpected second divorce came to me as a real shock, and I was only too happy to have my two sons eventually come back to me as a result. 212
It was during our stay in Kliptown that I met Dr. Mary Xakana again and we picked up those loose ends of our friendship, when she was preparing to get married to Mr. Wally Xahana. I was on the committee which planned and ran their wedding programme. It was very heartening to me at that time to realize that my old circle of friends still accepted me and wanted me to share with them in their affairs, despite the stigma of my divorce. I soon discovered that my husband and Wally Xakana were also friends of very long standing. Mary and I were now drawn together by our common interests as married women, mothers and old friends from Orlando. We lived within walking distance and so it was no problem calling on one another. Our stay in Kliptown gave me the opportunity to know Mary as a doctor, mother and wife as well as a community worker and friend. Mary attended me as a doctor during my pregnancy and attended the birth of my youngest son, Godfrey. Her eldest daughter was born about nine months before my son. For six years we were very good neighbours. Chapter 16 213
Twenty Thousand Strong We Marched by Helen Joseph We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental right to freedom, justice and security. I shall never forget what I saw on 9 August 1956—thousands of women standing in silence for a full thirty minutes, arms raised high in the clenched fist of the Congress salute. Twenty thousand women of all races, from all parts of South Africa, were massed together in the huge stone amphitheatre of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the administrative seat of the Union government, high on a hill. The brilliant colours of African headscarves, the brightness of Indian saris and the emerald green of the blouses worn by Congress women merged into an unstructured design, woven together by the very darkness of those thousands of faces. They had marched that 20,000, pressed solidly together, not in formal ranks, from the lowest of the Union Buildings terraced gardens, climbing up those many steps, terrace by terrace, behind their leaders. Lilian Ngoi, Rahima Moosa, Sophie Willilams and I, Helen Joseph, together with four women from more distant areas, had led the women up to the topmost terrace and into the amphitheatre. I turned my head once as we came up. I could see nothing but women following us, thousands of women marching, carrying letters of 214
defiant protest against unjust laws, against the hated pass system, against passes for African women. We represent and we speak on behalf of thousands of women—
women who could not be with us. But all over this country, at this moment, women are watching and thinking of us. Their hearts are with us. We are women from every part of South Africa. We are women of every race; we come from the cities and the towns, from the reserves and the villages—we come as women united in our purpose to save the African women from the degradation of passes. Raids, arrests, loss of pay, long hours at the pass office, weeks in the cells awaiting trial, forced farm labour—this is what the pass laws have brought to African men. . . punishment and misery, not for a crime, but for the lack of a pass. We African women know too well the effect of this law upon our homes, upon our children. We who are not African women know how our sisters suffer. . . We shall not rest until all pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedom have been abolished. We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental right to freedom, justice and security. We took those letter of protest into the Union Buildings, to the offices of the Prime Minister, Johannes Strijdom. He was not there. We flooded his office with them and returned to the thousands of women waiting for us, packed so tightly together, overflowing the amphitheatre. We stood on the little stone rostrum, looking down on the women again, and Lilian Ngoi called on them to stand in silent 215
protest for thirty minutes. As she raised her right arm in the Congress salute, 20,000 arms went up and stayed up for those endless minutes. We knew that all over South Africa, women in other cities and towns were also gathered in protest. We were not just 20,000 women, but many thousands more. The clock struck three and then a quarter past; it was the only sound. I looked at those many faces until they became only one face, the face of the suffering black people of South Africa. I know that there were tears in my eyes and I think that there were many who wept with me. At the end of that half hour, Lilian began to sing, softly at first, “Nkosi Sikelele” (Lord, give strength to Africa!”). For blacks it has become their national anthem and the voices rose, joining Lilian, ever louder and stronger. Then I heard the new song, composed specially for the protest, by a woman from the Orange Free State, “Wahint’ a bafazi, wa uthint’ imbolodo uzo kufa” (“You have struck a rock, you have tampered with the women, you shall be destroyed!”). It was meat for Strijdom, the Prime Minister, the grim‐faced, dedicated apostle of apartheid and white domination, implacable enemy of the struggle of the black people for freedom and justice. As it was always sung in the Sotho language, the implication of the last phrase usually passed unnoticed by whites. The protest over, the women went away, down the terrace steps, with the same dignity and discipline with which they had come, but now singing, down to the public road and the lovely gardens stood empty again. Yet not really empty, for I think the indomitable spirit remained. Perhaps it is still there, unseen, unheard, unfelt, for the women that day had made the Union Buildings their own. That was on 9 August 1956. Today, nearly thirty years later, it is celebrated as National Women’s Day, both here in South Africa 216
amongst those who carry on the struggle for freedom and in other lands where the liberation movement, led by the African National Congress, is known and honoured. How it came to pass that we made our protest that day at the Union Buildings—the most hallowed seat of white government—is a small part, but nevertheless a part of the history of our country, South Africa. It is even more a part of the story of South Africa’s liberation from fearsome racist oppression and domination. It is a story that continues even to this day. It is a story that will be told by others in the years to come, perhaps by some now in gaol. Some who have fled South Africa have already told parts of the story. It is a story that must be told and because I played a small part in this great struggle, I am proud to be one of those who help to tell it. The Federation of South African Woman came into being in the early 1950s, at the same time as the effect of the notorious Suppression of Communism Act was being felt. The Act had been passed in 1950, two years after the Nationalist Party had come to power. It was ostensibly to combat the threat of communism, but its real purpose was to harass and hamstring all opponents of the government. B this Act, the Minister of Justice could, through “banning” orders, restrict the freedom of association and movement of any person whom he “deemed” to be furthering the aims of communism. By the end of 1953 a temporary halt occurred in the flood of repressive restriction orders issued under the Suppression of Communism Act. A banned man had appealed against the validity of his banning orders on the grounds that he had not been granted a hearing before they were served on him. He had taken his case to the highest court in the land and there his appeal had been upheld. Overnight, people had found that their banning orders were invalid. 217
Although this freedom was not to last for long (by the following May the Act had been amended to provide for the banning of people without a hearing), the loophole had allowed, in those few months of respite, two banned women to bring into being a new and unique multiracial women’s organization. They were also able themselves to attend and speak at its inaugural conference. Ray Alexander and Hilda Bernstein were two feminist stalwarts amongst the leaders in the liberation struggle. Ray was a well‐known and much loved trade union leader. Latvian born, with an accent she was never to lose completely, Ray won all hearts with her outgoing warmth and her “My dear. . .” and she meant it. In trade union circles she is a legend. Many tales are told of her early union organizing days, going from two to town by rain, from factory to factory on foot. A staunch Communist Party member, she was elected to Parliament by Africans when they still had three representatives, but was barred from taking her seat through the provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act. Hilda Bernstein was in many ways like Ray—a warm‐hearted communist, free from the chauvinism so often a feature of communism. She was elected by whites in 1943 to the Johannesburg City Council—the only communist ever to achieve this. During the Sharpeville Emergency of 1960 we were detained together in Pretoria Central gaol and her gay spirit helped all of us there. Hilda’s intense love for her own children flowed outwards into deep concern for the sufferings of all women and particularly for black women. Undeterred by their previous banning orders, these two women set about realizing a dream they shared of a mass women’s organization of all races that would take its stand on women’s rights and play its part in the struggle for the liberation of both men and women. I am sure that they could not have foreseen the amazing progress of this 218
new organization, reaching its peak in that gathering of 20,000 women at the Union Buildings on 9 August. I heard from Hilda about the plans for an inaugural conference to launch this new body of women, unique because of its multiracial character. Many women of all races would speak on issues close to them and to their daily lives. Additionally, Olive Schreiner’s book Women and Labour had impressed me greatly. I was thus delighted to assist with the organizing of this conference, with their sights set on their own rights as women. However, by far the most organizing was done by Hilda and Ra through their widespread contacts with women, built up over many years. They had the eager help of the African National Congress Women’s League and several trade unions. The conference drew over 150 women from all over the country, some wearing brilliantly coloured national dress, all eager to participate in the proceedings. Interpreters were sometimes hard put to accommodate the variety of languages—English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Afrikaans. An impressive Women’s Charter was presented to the conference and adopted. It had considerable feminist emphasis but also reflected clearly the conditions of oppressed black people. The conference as highlighted by the speeches of the women from the floor during periods of discussion. Lilian Ngoyi protested against Bantu education, the government plan for separate and inferior education for blacks. “Bantu education makes African women like fowls laying eggs for others to take away and do what they like with!” she declared. Then she spoke of the shanty towns where she herself had once lived: “where a man must dress with the blanket between his teeth because his family sleeps in the same room”. 219
Lilian accused African husbands of holding back their wives from the conference. She was a widow but I doubt that any husband would have been able to hold her back. That was the first time I saw Lilian Ngoyi, later to become the greatest leader of women in the 1950s. Soon afterwards she came to see me in my office, a slender woman dressed simply but smartly in a black suit, wearing a little round black hat. I never saw her in anything but one of these little black hats. She did not wear the customary beret of so many African women of that time. Lilian was beautiful then, beautiful and black; in her forties, but looking only thirty, head often tilted a little to one side on her slim neck, laughing eyes and a flashing smile to show an enchanting little gap in her front teeth. I could not of course know how closely our lives would be bound together as leaders in the Federation of South African Women, in and out of gaol together, on trial together for over four years, banned and separated from each other over long periods‐
or that we should walk together leading 20,000 women in protest against passes. She became one of my closest and dearest friends—a joy and a delight to be with, even though this was not to be very often. The conference allowed, for the first time, the voices of the women of South Africa to be heard. They listened with interest to the scheduled speakers on women of India, of China, on the need for a women’s organization, on the need for world peace. Their own emphasis was on the struggle of men and women together for freedom and justice, on the need to stand together in that struggle and the determination of women to fight for the rights of their children. My own most worthwhile experience of that conference was in fact afterwards, when the other organizers had returned to their homes and children and I was left to entertain twenty black women from 220
other areas until their departure later in the day. Entertaining black friends from South Africa is always a problem because of the lack of multiracial amenities, but we were soon off on a black bus for a picnic with boxes of minerals, fruit and buns. I think this was what I had been waiting for so long—complete acceptance as a person‐and I had got it. Songs, laughter, dancing and then to the railway station and a joyous farewell, with anticipation of another conference. That first conference of the Federation was a very deep experience for me and I was moved when I was elected to the national executive, for I had been quite happy to be a backroom person at the conference. The conference had indeed been held just in time for Ray and Hilda to speak there, for it was only a few weeks before the new amendment to the Suppression of Communism Act was passed and both women were soon re‐banned. They had used their respite heroically to bring this new organization into being, for it was undoubtedly to become the most dynamic of women’s organizations in the history of South Africa. Lilian Ngoyi and I grew to know each other quite well and since she worked in a Johannesburg clothing factory, we would occasionally meet for a sandwich in a car during her short lunch break. I began to understand better the acute transport problems for African people, especially women; long bus queues stretching around two sides of a street block, unbelievably crowded trains, passengers clinging outside onto closed doors, and the dangerous walk home from the railway station or bus stop through dark, totally unlit streets. These difficulties made evening meetings for the Federation women impossible, so we had to rely on weekends which meant that again the women had to travel in from the townships. Nevertheless our first Transvaal provincial conference was successful. 221
Josie Palmer, veteran leader of African protest against location permits even in the 1930s was elected Transvaal President and I became Honorary Secretary. This time I was not a white woman doing things for black people but a member of a mixed committee headed by a black woman. It was different—and better than anything I had known before. Towards the end of 1954, the Johannesburg Municipality announced a sharp increase in rentals for Soweto, the sprawling, spreading township housing the ill‐paid workers and their families, the people who had no money for an increase in rent. The Federation too up the issue, calling another multiracial conference. Once again women spoke from the floor, describing their pitiful homes and their inability to meet any increase of rent. I wished that the hall could have been filled with housewives from white suburbs to hear them. But it wasn’t, nor was the Federation ever able to attract more than a handful of white women from the Black Sash or the Liberal Party to attend its conferences. Our identification with the African National Congress and the liberation movement saw to that. It was a small price to pay for the tremendous feeling of oneness with the national struggle for freedom. From its early days the Federation had felt drawn to the Women’s International Democratic Federation, formed in Europe at the end of the Second World War, to unite women in defence of their rights and to work for peace and social progress. It claimed to represent 140 million women from all parts of the world, through its affiliated organizations. Both Ray and Hilda were in close contact with the International Federation and cherished the idea of the South African Federation affiliating to it. We certainly maintained contact with it, but never got as far as even debating affiliation, certainly not in the Transvaal. 222
This International Federation had what was, for us, a most attractive policy of inviting women to attend their conference in Europe and then sending them on sponsored tours, mainly to the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, even as far as the People’s Republic of China. I am sure the Federation would have gladly accepted invitations to conferences and sponsored tours to the West just as happily, but none came our way. The World Federation was to hold a World Congress of Mothers in Lausanne and the Federation was invited to send two delegates to the preparatory council meeting in Geneva in February as well as to the congress later in the year. The Transvaal and Cape regions were the best established areas of the Federation so we were to send one delegate from each region. For us in the Transvaal there was one outstanding choice, Lilian Ngoi. We knew that this great speaker and leader would not merely hold her own with women from other lands but would be our ambassador to bring the sufferings of black people and the struggle for liberation to the notice of women outside South Africa. Dora Tamana was chosen as the other delegate. We began to prepare for the women to go. In those days it was not yet illegal to leave South Africa without a passport, although travel companies were reluctant to carry passportless passengers for fear of compromising themselves with the South African authorities. Passports for white political people were not impossible to obtain, though often difficult. For blacks there were almost insuperable difficulties. Radically political blacks just did not get passports, so means had to be found to get them transported without documents. There was no difficulty at the London end, merely separate queues for those with and those without passports. I was going to Europe on leave for a few months, for the first time in nearly twenty years. I was therefore delighted when arrangements were made for me to fly from London to attend the Geneva Council 223
meeting as an observer, in addition to our two special delegates. I still had a valid passport so would have no difficulties and I should hear from Hilda when and where to meet the two women on their arrival in London in January 1955. I reached London just after the New Year and found letters from Hilda to tell me that the plans for sending Lilian and Dora by sea had misfired because they had been discovered, passportless, on board ship before it sailed from Cape Town. The captain had refused to transport them, despite their paid passages. They had come undaunted to Johannesburg, from where they would be sent somehow to London where I must meet them. On the day they were expected, I waited for hours at the airport, fearful for them. Then I found a friendly porter to take a note through the customs and immigration barriers to say “I am here, waiting for you.” They came at last, triumphant and excited, and we hugged each other, a little surprised that no one thought this in any way odd for a white and two blacks. They told me of their adventures. On the ship they had hidden themselves in the lavatory waiting for the ship to sail before they dared to come out. They had been terrified when loud knocks and a command to come out had been heard. How they were found out none of us knows and we never shall. They could do nothing but open the door. The plan had failed somewhere along the way. Once in Johannesburg, it had been easier to get onto an aeroplane, but they were very apprehensive until the plane actually took off. Racially‐mixed air travel was still comparatively rare in South Africa and at first the two black women encountered hostile looks and whispered comments from the passengers. Then the captain announced that this was his plane and that there would be no apartheid on board. All his passengers were equal. 224
After hearing this, I was convinced that nothing could daunt Lilian and Dora. They would overcome all obstacles. We had a couple of weeks together in London and were preparing to go to Geneva when International Federation officials informed us that it had been decided that Lilian and Dora should not go to Switzerland at this stage for the council meetings as they might encounter difficulties there about passports and might even be sent back to South Africa. It would be simpler for them to fly direct to East Berlin from where they could set off on extensive travels, retuning later for the Congress of Mothers in Lausanne. It would not matter so much if they were then sent back to South Africa because by that time they would already be on their way back. I went alone to Geneva for the preparatory council meeting, now promoted to delegate, feeling very inadequate about representing South African women at this large gathering of women from all over the world. But I went, and there I met women from Burma, Indochina, the USA and Canada, the Argentine and near East countries and from every country in Europe. I listened carefully to their speeches, in many cases accounts of suffering and disabilities comparable to the South Africa scene. From others I heard affirmation of their countries’ achievements and a will to assist others still striving for basic human rights. I sat there, full of admiration for these dynamic, eloquent women leaders. I think I had not fully realized the implication of being a delegate and no longer an observer, for I was startled when I was asked on which day I would be ready to address the conference and report on South Africa. I was still an inexperienced public speaker and no orator. I was white and had no real right to describe the unshared sufferings of others in my colour‐ridden land, whereas these hundreds of delegates could and did speak from their own experience. 225
I drafted a speech for one of the organizers to consider, but she said it was too flat and I am sure it was. Then we talked about my life in South Africa and I told her, not only of our Federation, but also of the unjust conditions of life and particularly of the government plan forcibly to remove the African people of Sophiatown in the western areas of Johannesburg to another area and the growing protest against it. Since I left South Africa, news of the impending removal and the Congress Alliance protest plans had been sparse in the overseas press, but I had learnt enough to know that the government intended to go its own ruthless way. The forced move would be taking place in February and the African people would try by all peaceful means to resist that move. My thoughts turned away from Geneva and back to Sophiatown and the protest. When I had finished, I was told “that’s it! That is what you must tell the women tomorrow.” When I faced those women from all over the world, I wanted them to understand the agony of Sophiatown and the oppression of the people by their white overlords. I spoke for Lilian and Dora, I spoke for the women of our Federation and for the black women of our land, and I wanted to convey the strength of our hope for the future. When I cam to the end I affirmed, “where you stand today, we shall stand tomorrow!” Then the miracle happened. That gathering of women rose to their feet in a standing ovation, not to me as a speaker, but to the women of South Africa whose message I had brought. For me it was a tremendous moment of disbelief but also of joy and of complete unity with the women there. I went back to London to find that Lilian and Dora had already left on their great adventure so I could not tell them about the conference. 226
I had hoped, secretly, and vainly, that perhaps I too might have been invited to visit some other country, for there seemed to be many invitations floating around, though almost entirely to black women. However, it did not happen. I think my disabilities were that I was white and not ideologically committed. Chapter 17 Other Faces Of Kofifi 227
by Don Mattera A hideous face belonged to squalor or poverty or sickness or death. There was no real difference: the greater part of Sophiatown was a deplorable, sickening slum. Blacks had freehold rights and some houses were comparable to those of whites living in the adjoining suburbs, but Sophiatown was rotting at the core because the Johannesburg City Council did not accept full responsibility for its maintenance. Public amenities such as sports fields, recreational facilities? There wasn’t a single football field in the whole township. Basketball and football were played in the school grounds and in the streets. Church halls, classrooms and zinc shacks became the boxing stables that produced many champions, and killers too. One such boxer was King Berry, who was hanged for brutally murdering his wife because of jealousy. The women composed a song which ran: ‘King Berry the champ killed the only thing he loved. He must have been bewitched. . .’ But Sophiatown also had its beauty; picturesque and intimate like most ghettos. Double‐storey mansions and quaint cottages, with attractive, well‐tended gardens, stood side by side with rusty wood‐
and‐iron shacks, locked in a fraternal embrace of filth and felony. Among the wealthy were African, coloured, Indian and Chinese people. One rich man, Mabuza, owned a double‐storey house which he filled with the most expensive furniture, to the tune of about thirty thousand pounds. Added to this was a three‐storey building with a huge dairy and butchery on the ground floor, five bedrooms on the upper storey and a big restaurant sandwiched between them. Mabuza, whose son Early became a famous jazz musician, owned 228
another large restaurant on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In Sophiatown, no‐one could choose their neighbours, so that alongside the wealthy Mabuzas or the Xumas or the Makhenes or the Rathebes lived the miserably poor and the wretched. All that the rich could do, at the time, was build high walls with broken glass cemented on top of them to keep out thieves. The rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited, all knitted together in a colourful fabric that ignored race or class structures. The children mixed freely whether their families disagreed or not. Children in their innocence hardly recognize the differences. There were no separate bourgeois areas or elite concert halls, just long streets and thousands of people who moved over each other like restless, voracious insects: blacks exploiting blacks. And what needs the white authorities failed to provide in the way of social amenities, the Catholic and Anglican Churches met at great cost. The rich landlords, among them many whites and Indians, never channeled any part of their huge profits back into the township; it was a dog‐
eat‐dog world, harsh and yet tender in a strange, paradoxical way. Sophiatown had two Jewish‐owned cinemas: the Picture Palace, also named Balanski after its owner, and the Odin owned by a man called Lakier. The Odin was said to be the largest cinema in the whole of Africa, with a seating capacity of about 1,100. It was also used as a concert hall, a church and a venue for mass political meetings by organizations such as the African National Congress, the Anti‐
Removals Committee, the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign Committee. The internationally known singer Miriam Makeba, now in exile and prohibited from returning to South Africa, also performed at the Odin—where knives and guns were carried and often brazenly used by members of the audience. Sometime between 1948 and 1950, while I was at school in Durban, Lakier also opened a Harlem‐USA type milk bar and juke‐box saloon complete with slot‐
machines and peer‐in movie boxes. 229
Almost everything we wore or ate was fashioned after American styles. Some gangs and gang members chose the names, habits and mannerisms of film stars such as George Raft, John Garfield and John Wayne, who was nicknamed Motsamai (swaggerer. Some fashion shops actually overpriced their clothes on the recommendations of he Americans gang who wanted—and were prepared to pay for—the exclusive privilege of wearing USA imports such as Florsheim, Nunn Bush and Jarman shoes. What they probably did not realize at the time was that the shops would bequeath the high‐price legacy into the sixties, seventies and eighties. ‘Made in the USA’ became the sole criterion and any rubbish that carried the USA label was desirable for that alone. And Sophiatown had many shops and tailors—invariably Jewish or Indian owned—that raked in huge profits on the ‘Made in the USA’ craze. Even the traditional African herbalists used brightly painted signs to advertise their USA aphrodisiacs, blood mixtures and lucky charms. And if you rejected the American fad, you would quickly be dubbed moegoe or greenhorn. The Face of Religion beamed like colourful fluorescent advertisements from the countless Christian sects and Hindu, Moslem and Buddhist segments that preached and sold their understanding of penitence, redemption and reconciliation with God. There were the rituals of the African amaZioni with their frenzied worshipping through cymbals and drums that rose and fell from midnight hour until dawn. Men, women, old and young and children called frantically upon their God as if He was on a long, long holiday. Churches competed for the redemption of souls; trying as it were to sell God at a bargain price to people who had stopped buying, not because they had no money, but because they had no faith. . . And salvation was going for a song but men, it appeared were not buying. Only older people opened their ears to listen to the song as they gave the remnants of their wasted and broken lives in final 230
compensatory service to the Great One—the Umkhulumkhulu; the Modimo, the Thixo, who ruled the earth and the sky. Then there was the mad rattling of tambourines and cymbals, which told of the pace and effort with which people sought refuge from themselves and from beliefs and superstition that were stronger than reason and even Christianity; the throwing of bones or charms often determined a life or a death. Many grew weary of placing the fate of their loved ones, and of their own souls, in the hands of the Unseen God in whose name they were being ruled and reviled. They turned to their traditional doctors when all else failed. And at dead of night, in the secret of his heart a man will call on his ‘doctor’. Patient: ‘Baba, Mukhosi—Father, King there is this thing which troubles my sleep and brings a shadow upon my house. O Baba, O Mukhosi Sizwe—O Father, O Ruler of our nation I seek your intercession with our sacred amadhlozi—our ancestors.’ Doctor: ‘I hear you, son of the troubled shadows whose house is without the peace of sleep. These amathambo (bones) are the voices of your dead kin; they will reveal to us the thorn of your affliction. In a moment all will be known—nothing is hidden from the amadhlozi. Say yes, vumani‐bo.’ Patient: ‘Siya vuma, Makhosi—We agree, Lord.’ And in the dim, flickering candlelight the nyanga (traditional doctor) will mumble his incoherent prayer and solicitation, rattling the sacred bones in his ochrous and beaded hands. The candlelight will move to the heat of his breath; now there, now here. And he will call and pray and invoke the ancient wisdom of his tribe as well as that of his patient’s ancestors. Doctor: ‘Makhosi, Makhosi, vumani‐bo, vumani‐bo!’ Patient: ‘Siya vuma, siya vuma, Makhosi. . . .’ 231
The bones will then roll onto the sacred rug and the wise tongue lick the eager round lips; the eyes will deepen and stare without a wink. Then will the head shake and the eyes—the perceptive and penetrating eyes—search and scrutinize the position of the bones. Then again and yet again will the bones rattle and dive onto the sacred rug where no foot or shoe may touch. Doctor: ‘Speak Makhosi, speak; your son of the shadow troubled by sleeplessness awaits your voice. Vumani‐bo!’ Patient: ‘Siya vuma (yes). We are united with your spirit!’ Then the bones will speak and the message will be delivered from the face that drips water and the tongue that licks the lips. The patient will listen attentively, and with his head bowed in deference to the presence of something greater than himself, greater than all that lives upon the ear, he will accept the message and await the prescription. The ancestors have spoken through their messenger, Siya vuma, we are obedient. Perhaps the ancestors will demand a life for the ‘life’ that is given to the patient; blood for blood. Then only will the shadows go to sleep and peace be restored. And the man or the child or the woman or the lamb or the goat will be slaughtered and the blood be given up. Then shall the shadows walk no more, and then will the long sleep return to purge the pain and the fear. Vumani‐bo, vumani‐bo. . . . The Roman Catholic and the Anglican, the Methodist and Lutheran Churches towered above the splintered Christian groupings like great pillars of strength. Ordered, organized. But badly out numbered though respected by the various sects as the cradle of their 232
adopted Christian faiths. But was their own African religion not older thant he one the early Christian pioneers had brought to Africa from across the great waters? And was it not their own African worship that called the lightning and thunder and the rain when the land was warped and wanting? Vumani‐bo, Makhosi! The Catholics and the Anglicans built huge mission schools alongside their churches, as did the Lutherans and the Methodists—all with funds provided by their white sponsors inside South Africa and across the seas. These parent Churches had strong Christian commitments to human dignity and social justice which were epitomized in men and women, nuns and priests, such as Fathers Rakale, Singleton, Sidebotham and Trevor Huddleston whose personal contribution to the people of Sophiatown cannot adequately be expressed on paper. But as I saw the good among the men of the cloth, so to did I see the bad and the evil. Preachers among the Christian sects used their churches for personal, financial or sexual gain. They accrued vast wealth in the name of God; sold bibles, crosses, ornaments and salvation rods covered with bright cloth, as well as leopard skins and sashes. Some clergymen had many women and actually ordered others to leave their homes and follow the Church—inevitably to bed. The preachers bought cars and lived in huge mansions—their cabins in the sky. All in His name. . . . And people understood and accepted this as ‘the will of God’. This was Sophiatown, where God was going for a song; going at a bargain price. . . . ‘Vumani‐bo, siya vuma!’ A swimming pool can be an oasis of fun and revelry to under‐
privileged children who have no recreation except football, boxing and street‐fighting—if the latter can be seen as recreation. The pool 233
then becomes a central meeting place where the bottled energies and frustrations peculiar to children living in a desert of hopelessness can be released. The pool at the Anglican Church’s St. Cyprian’s Primary School in Meyer Street attracted children from far and wide. All hues, all shapes and sizes flocked faithfully—like war‐torn and weather‐
beaten refugees to ‘San Ceepee’, as the school was called. ‘Dipping pool’ would have been more appropriate because overcrowding made swimming virtually impossible. Diving also had its risks. You would be wading on top of somebody and the next minute another dark body would dive on you as if you were invisible. But the pool brought us together—children of the rich and the poor, and the orphans, to expend our energies and renew those links that the Group Areas laws had severed through forced separation. It was also a place for pranks and mischievousness. A friend of mine, Tolla‐Tolla, once brought a small beehive to the pool. Many boys who could not afford swimming trunks were allowed to swim naked, and so we waited until the pool was teeming with children. Tolla‐Tolla covered his head with a hue towel and flung the bees into the pool. Talk about a quick evacuation! In no time the place was deserted but for a few brave heads that bobbed up out of the water—bees or no bees—for those vital whiffs of fresh air. Priests and pranksters scattered for the safety of the toilets, washrooms and vestries as the angry insects attacked everybody including the parish cats and canines. What Tolla‐Tolla’s head did not receive in stings, his exposed bottom got abundantly. My eyes were so badly puffed that I was admitted to the hospital. On my return to the pool two weeks after the incident, I was roundly condemned, and received a few stokes from Father Rakale’s thick belt. I was prohibited from using the pool for several weeks. But Tolla‐Tolla was not. At the pool, he smiled wryly at me. 234
‘My head was covered, boy. What they can’t see they can’t blame,’ he said, tapped me on the head and jumped into the water. My behaviour improved to the point where I was trained as a lifesaver and sadly helped to retrieve the bodies of a girl and a boy in a single week. The Anglicans also operated a small but comprehensive school library, from which I borrowed my first copy of Peter Abraham’s Tell Freedom and Native Son by the late Richard Wright; books borrowed but shamefully not returned. They made an impression on me which was to help influence my thinking. From Ekhutuleni soup kitchen, behind the chapel, the nuns distributed food rations which my Tswana cousins and I collected for the family. We were also given two slices of bread each, thickly smeared with peanut butter or jam, and a mug of milk—all with the compliments of Father Huddleston’s African Children’s Feeding Scheme. The Catholic Church offered literacy classes for young and old as well as film shows and a library which was housed inside a nunnery called Notre Dame. What Sophiatown lacked in recreation halls and sportsfields Western Native Township had in abundance: an up‐to‐date library with lots of reading and study space and neat desks and chairs; a community hall and a well‐equipped youth centre. There were three football fields, two tennis courts, a cloakroom fitted with toilets and showers and a huge centrally‐situated public washroom with baths and showers. I recall with a feeling of deep nostalgic joy the legendary Dorcas crèche in Western where, as a child of about five years, I was cared for after being lost for a week. The township also had spacious lawns and beautiful pine, fir and bluegum trees—all well tended and trimmed—
and a children’s park, complete with swings, see‐saws, slides and rocking horses. 235
There was a massive exodus to Western on certain weekdays and especially on Sundays, for those traditionally rival football matches that often ended with brawls when police vehicles, with swinging doors from which hung laughing, excited constables, would zoom onto the field and with their whistles screaming law and order, would chase and grab anything on two feet. And as the people ran, if you were looking far enough beyond the dust of the speeding police vans and the running feet, you could see the setting sun roll and fall gently into a hole at the southern edge of Western Township to give birth to his neuter offspring called twilight. Then you could see the fading shadows and the silhouettes of tired sportsmen and their supporters trudge wearily through the surreal cloud of dust. People and their dogs moving homeward; children asleep on their mother’ backs moving from light into semi‐
darkness and finally into night itself; half free, half slaves. And if you were listening hard enough with your heart and ears close to the breast of the night, you would hear the strong chorus of chirping crickets greeting mankind. Yes, only if you were looking beyond the screeching police vehicles and the dust of running, anxious feet were you part of that wondrous transition. No foreigner ever visited Sophiatown and remained quite the same, or left South Africa untouched by the unfathomable magic of the condemned township, and the madness that throbbed in its restless brain. In January 1942, while the Allied forces battled tirelessly against the German army—which was openly supported and abetted in South Africa by the fifth column Ossewa Brandwag—an unarmed cleric of the Anglican Church in London visited our country. He stayed for several weeks in Sophiatown’s Priory of Christ The King in Meyer Street. The priest administered the sacraments to his melanic flock and trudged all over the sprawling township, meeting and talking to people from all walks, and pitfalls of life. Before his return 236
to England, he wrote a short piece on Meyer Street, Sophiatown which appeared in The Star, ‘A Little Glimpse of Sophiatown’ may illustrate the bewitching effect that Kofifi had on people. ‘. . .I have found a street in this city which is unique in my experience of streets. I have seen nothing like it in London or in all England, or in France, or in Spain, or still less in Australia, which is the other new country I know. Just as the average Londoner has never been to Madame Tussaud’s or the Tower, so it occurs to me that most Johannesburg people may never have been to Meyer Street, Sophiatown. If you wish to explore, you can take the Newlands car to stop NO. 36, and it is on your right. The beginning of the street is ordinary enough, running uphill for 200 yards, with tarmac and footpaths and gutters. After that there are no footpaths, no gutters, no tarmac and the houses are innocent of waterbourne sewage. You had best look where you are stepping, partly because the road is rock and there are a good many loose stones, and partly because of the local dustbins. If you g, as I did, on a Saturday afternoon, you will find it extremely populous. The street mounts sharply, and if you pick your way to the top you will find a church, a school, a hospital, a house called ‘Ekuteleni’, where lady workers live, and a clergy house, which may be why my steps were dogged by grubby urchins who grinned at me and said, ‘How d’you do, Farder? Goodbye, Farder! Good afternoon, Farder!’ At the top of the hill the street drops, and the intrepid explorer finds an outcrop of rock. If you came thus far by car you made a mistake and you had better get out, because there is no way through for a car. However, you can walk down and cross the intersection of Edward Road. Then, straight ahead of you, there is a pond. I can’t help thinking that if you want ponds in your streets they would look better if they were not quite so oozy and slimy. This one is deepest along by the containing wall in 237
front of some houses, and is about three‐quarters of the width of the street. At the moment it is about 50 yards long, but I daresay if the weather turns dry there may be rather less water and rather more smell. It happened I wanted a small job done, so I turned into a yard which had a notice, ‘Boot and Shoemaker herein. Beware of the dog. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ There was smell of hens. A man met me and said, ‘no. He’s been gone from here a long time.’ The smell was asserting itself. I fled, and walked the rest of the way to the end of Meyer Street. It ends abruptly with high iron railings with spikes at the top. If you peep through the railings you see the country, clean and unspoilt. That, no doubt, symbolizes something, but what?. . .’ Other men of the sacred cloth also visited Sophiatown to see first‐
hand what their parliamentarian representatives called ‘the place of sin and iniquity’ and ‘the cyst of the cancer of communism’. The mission of these Pharisees was not to clothe; to feed; to comfort; to share; to visit and to bury ‘the least of God’s creations’. No, they came that the scriptures of apartheid might be fulfilled in their granite temples and in their parliament. This was the law; blind t pain and blind to human beauty. They came only that the scriptures of power and separation might be fulfilled according to the Covenant of their austere and unsmiling God. It was the Law. . . . 238
Chapter 18 The Cuban Brothers And The Manhattan Brothers by Miriam Makeba We are happy amateurs. Whenever there is a community sing, or a fund‐raising activity for the church, or an amateur contest, the Cuban Brothers are there. I am the band’s female vocalist. Like the others, I do not get paid. It’s just fun for me. I like my friends in the group, these young boys. It seems as if my nightmare marriage to Gooli was from some other time, and I am starting over with this new life of mine. Of course, I am only twenty years old. 239
I guess I am as tall as I ever will be, which is five feet three inches. This is not very tall, is it? And I am very shy, too. I am just this way by nature. Except when I sing. Then, watch out! “Come on‐a my house I give you candy!” The hit songs from America make their way over to us. We include some in the Cuban Brothers’ performances, along with ballads and dance tunes in all the tribal languages. We are getting to be known in our township of Orlando East. People come to the Donaldson Community Center to hear us. They dance. We have a good time. But it is difficult for a young woman to be on stage. Many people in our society look at it as something bad. The old thing that women are not supposed to go on stage and show themselves take some time to die. I have heard the neighbors gossip; “So‐and‐so’s daughter is a whore because she is on stage.” I can imagine what they are saying about me: “She left her husband to show herself on stage! Why isn’t she at home raising her child, instead of having her mother do it so she can sing?” But my mother has made up her mind when it comes to my singing. She encourages me to do it because it is what my father would have wanted if he had lived. My father was a very musical man. He played piano and composed music. My mother would sing and he would accompany her. My mother tells me that my father wanted me to study music. It was his one real hope for me. Now that I am singing with my nephew Zweli’s band, my mother thinks it is fine. But I am not to be a female Cuban Brother for long. Some men show up at the Donaldson Center during one of our shows. Maybe they have heard of us. Maybe they just came by chance. But here they are, and one of them is a singer named Nathan Mdlhedlhe. Mr. 240
Mdlhedlhe is the leader of one of the country’s most popular bands: the Manhattan Brothers. Everyone has heard of the Manhattan Brothers. We listen to them on the radio. They put out records, and they tour all over the country. When I finish singing with the band and Mr. Mdlhedlhe comes up to introduce himself, I can’t believe it. As I do whenever I meet someone who is older or someone I should respect, I curtsy to him. This is the way I have been brought up. “I really enjoyed your show, Miss Makeba,” he says. He is a tall and large man, very commanding. A thin mustache of the debonair “Manhattan” style runs above his lip. His suit, I notice, is a nice one. I thank him for his compliment, although I think he is just being polite. Surely an amateur band like ours is beneath his notice. But he seems sincere when he says, “You have a lovely voice. It’s the voice of a nightingale.” I must look very surprised and embarrassed, because he smiles down at me. “I’m sincere. And I want you to come audition for us. The Manhattan Brothers need a female vocalist.” If I could manage to speak, I might argue. I would say that he surely does not mean me; that the Manhattan Brothers can choose among any female singers in the country as their vocalist; that I have never sung professionally before in my life. . . Zweli and the others are too amazed to complain that they might lose me. It’s only an audition, I tell myself and everyone else. It’s so farfetched. 241
Yes, it is farfetched. Very far. But somehow, I don’t know how, I fetch it. The men listen to me sing In addition to Nathan Mdlhedlhe and the musicians, there are the singers Joe Mogotsi, Rufus Khoza, and Ronnie Majola. They like the way I look, the sound of my voice, and the way I behave on stage. I listen to their compliments in a daze. And when they tell me I am hired, I really think I am dreaming. How did this happen? One day I am singing with an amateur band with Zweli, and the next moment I am to be with one of the biggest groups in the country. Life has not been easy for me and it never made much sense to dream of things that are too impossible. I never wasted my time dreaming of living a life in show business, or of doing what I like to do more than anything else in the world, which is singing. But now, all of these are coming true as if it is, well, a dream! They tell me that the job does not pay a lot of money. The travel is hard. But if they pay me a shilling it will be more than I have ever earned before as a singer. And the travel I think of as an adventure. All I can answer is: “When do you want me to I start?” “The first thing you’ll need is a name,” Nathan tells me. Even though he is the leader of the group, he won’t allow me to call him Mr. Mdlhedlhe. ‘Miriam Makeba sounds better than Zenzi Makeba. We’ll use your English name.” New handbills and posters are made for the Manhattan Brothers. They say: “And Introducing Miriam Makeba, Our Own Nut Brown Baby.” Rehearsals begin at Nathan’s house. I learn right away that with four men singing behind me—Nathan, Ronnie, Joe, and Rufus—I have to be loud. There will be times when I won’t have a microphone to help me. On their own, the men sing American songs by the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers. When we are together we sing native African tunes as well as popular songs in English. Because we are black, 242
however, we are not permitted to record songs in the English language. Six musicians make up the band: a sax, trumpet, straight‐
up bass, piano, and the drummers. I listen carefully to what everyone tells me. The men are older than I by at least ten years, and they know a lot about show business. I am very eager to learn. Everyone is kind to me, and encouraging. My older cousin, Peggy Phango, is also a big help. She takes me to the movies, and we talk. Peggy is a good singer and actress. She was just in a movie that was made here in South Africa called Cry, the Beloved Country. The story is about South Africa. The great old actor Canada Lee is the star, and also a young man by the name of Sidney Poitier. Peggy is full of advice. She teaches me all about clothes and how to match colors. During the performances I am to wear Western‐style outfits: the stiff petticoats that flare out. Sometimes I wear tight, strapless evening dresses. I am very tiny, but my proportions are good, and with Peggy’s help, I can even look glamorous. She tries to pluck my eyebrows, but it is too painful. “Please,” I beg her, “leave me alone. Makeup does not agree with me, either. I don’t like it. My mother says, “Don’t put all those things on your face. They don’t look right on you” Of course, there is nothing non‐African about makeup. In the old days, people had different colors of clay that they used to make designs on their bodies and faces. The Egyptian women used makeup three thousand years ago But today, ladies’ makeup is manufactured by white companies for whites. It does not suit the color of our skin. A black girl looks s if she is wearing a mask. Her face is a different shade from her neck. I am to be paid five pounds per show. This is not much money, but it is a living if we give five performances a week. The shows, held in concert halls in the black townships, are long. We sing for four hours, 243
from eight in the evening until midnight. The audience sits in chairs, which are removed for dancing afterward. The musicians then play until five in the morning. But I do not stay to dance. I’m too tired. Also, if we are in the Pretoria area, I rush home to my mother’s so I can be with Bongi. She is a beautiful three‐year‐old; thin like me, but already growing tall like her father. My separation from Gooli is permanent, now. Son we will be getting a divorce. A journalist from the big African newspaper The Bantu World comes to one of our shows. The next day someone gives me the paper and there is my first review. The Manhattan Brothers gather around to see if their hunch about me was correct. I am too nervous to read, so I give the paper to someone else. The reviewer writes that I “sing like a nightingale.” “What did I tell you!” Nathan says. Everybody whoops it up and is very happy. “Oh, my!” I say. I am proud, but very embarrassed by the attention. Now when Nathan introduces me during the shows, I am no longer the “Nut Brown Baby.” I’m “the nightingale.” In South Africa, there is a new dance every week. The couples like to show off before the bandstand. But they are not the only ones who are showing off. Gangsters come to the clubs. I have been warned that these are very rough places. There are fights, shootings, stabbings Some of our shows end in riots. It’s very dangerous. The gangsters do whatever they want. Blacks are not supposed to drink, but these men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the table. Then they take out their guns and put these in front of them on the table, too. We are all supposed to look, and we can’t help ourselves: We do. They are like actors, these gangsters, although they do not play. In South Africa, movies are 244
taken very seriously, and there is a movie in the cinemas now in which Richard Widmark plays a hoodlum. They call him Styles, and he dresses up in a hat, a belted jacket, and those Florsheim shoes. The black gangsters o out and dress just like him. In the movie, Richard Widmark eats an apple after each of his crimes. So, all the African hoodlums have gone out and gotten apples, to! I see them right there on the tables between the bottles and the guns. I am singing in Alexander Township. The club is known to be very, very rough. I look down from the stage and I see all these gangsters in front. They sit back with their feet up on the tables and they look at me. I can tell they want me as their gangster moll, I’m nervous. A girl may like them or not like them, it does not matter, because if they think they want her, they take her. I sing one of the Manhattan Brothers’ most popular songs: “Saduva.” When I am finished, the gangsters make me sing it again. Nathan and the boys play the number once more, because we know these men mean business. But the gangsters are not satisfied. They make me sing “Saduva” again, and then another time. It becomes a game to them. I am scared to death. All the musicians can see the guns on the table. The gangsters can start shooting up the place anytime they want. I am forced to sing “Saduva” over and over, until I have sung it twenty times. I am about to collapse from nervous exhaustion. Nathan steps forward and says the show is over. He is very brave. I hurry off stage, and with another singer who is there, Susan Rabashan, we leave through a side exit. We are in the alley when the gangsters come out and spot us. I think they are probably drunk and might try to do something to us right there. Susan and I run to the street to try to get a taxi. The men chase us. A car comes with other men inside. They signal for us to jump in. We do, and we find ourselves in the company of a rival gang. Susan is truly scared, but, fortunately, among these men I recognize a distant cousin. Sipho is his name. I know that even though these men belong to a gang, I am once again safe in the embrace of my extended 245
family. I thank Sipho for rescuing us. His friends are amused and maybe disappointed that they can’t have their way with us, but really, Sipho would just have to kill them if they tried anything. So they take us home. Home, at the end of 1953, is my very first house. Blacks are not allowed to own property anymore. We can only lease. I can’t afford to buy a house, anyway, and I rent a little place in Mofolo. Mofolo is one of the black Southwestern Townships of Johannesburg. Because of apartheid, all of the Africans are being herded into these townships that the government is building. My house in Mofolo is a gray prefab one just like all the others. It has four rooms: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. The bathroom is outside. The yards are not big, but the people of each house make nice little flower gardens in front. In the backyards there are vegetable gardens, and sometimes chicken coops. We shop in clean, modern stores that are run by blacks but owned by whites. My mother comes to live with me. For the first time in her life, she no longer has to work. I can support her. And Bongi comes, too. My house is truly a home. I am not so busy with the Manhattan Brothers that I cannot appreciate this happiness. I watch my daughter run down the block, a happy little four‐year‐old, past all the gray houses with the little trees tied to the lawns with strings. The land is flat, and as far as the eyes can see there are gray houses. Where the gray of Mofolo ends, the white houses of White city township begin. My brother Joseph lives in the Dube Township, two train stops away. Other family members have been relocated here. We make the best of these settlements. Having relatives around helps. We are all in the same boat. But this is nothing new for Africans. The Manhattan Brothers are recording stars for Gallotone Records. I join them in the studio many times to make 78 rpm recordings. We 246
are paid for these sessions, and that is all. I receive two pounds ten shillings for a day’s work. We don’t know anything about royalties, and Galltone is not offering. Even if we compose songs that are published, we are not paid royalties. There is a musicians’ union in South Africa, but we are not permitted to join because we are black singers to sign on, there is no guarantee that we will be recognized by the record companies. Work begins when we rent a three‐story building in downtown Johannesburg. We call it the Artists’ Union Center. There are meeting rooms here, and places for us to rehearse. Classes are offered for children who want to be musicians. Everyone volunteers to make the Center work. Some of us pose for advertisements for a piano manufacturer, and the company gives us a piano that we need. Not only professionals, but others who love music come and teach the young people. At Gallotone one day, I am asked to make a record on my own. “With the Manhattan Brothers backing me?” I ask. “No,” they tell me. “You’ll be solo on this one. It’ll be a Miriam Makeba record.” My very first record! The song is originally a Xhosa tune: “Lakutshuna Ilangu.” Mankhewekwe Dvushe wrote the beautiful love song, which is about a lonely man who sits before the setting sun. He does not see his lover, and he is asking what has happened to her. He says, “I will come looking for you everywhere/in the hospitals, in the jails/until I find you/Because as the sun goes down, I can’t stop thinking of you.” Hospitals and jails: The Africans know what this means. Whenever one of us is missing for a time and we don’t come home, the first lace the family looks is the hospital or the jail. 247
The song sells very well. I am asked to record other records on my own, but this one was my “breakthrough.” They play my record on the radio. The song travels overseas. In America, a songwriter likes it and writes some English lyrics. Gallotone asks if I will rerecord the song. I wonder how I can do this, since it is forbidden for a black person to sing on a record in the English language. But the company knows a hit when they see one, and they insist. I guess color barriers are broken this way. I go back into the studio, and once again I record the beautiful song that now goes by the strange title, “You Tell Such Lovely Lies.” What has happened to my wonderful Xhosa song? The American version has nothing to do with the original. The new lyrics are terrible: “You tell such lovely lies with our two lovely eyes! When I leave your embrace, another takes my place.” Everyone who hears the Xhosa version and the American version is disappointed. They are nothing alike. But the new one sells well. People begin to recognize me on the street. Some say, “How do you do, Miss Makeba?” Some even thank me for a performance. But this is all. In my culture, no one wants to be impolite or pushy. In the West, show business people are always asked to sign their names on pieces of paper. It seems that their admirers find some magic in these signatures; they can say they now own a piece of the celebrity and a part of their idol’s glamour. Someone tells me it’s like the Aztec Indians who ate the hearts of mighty warriors killed in battle so they could obtain their enemy’s strength. These Westerners are very superstitious people. Just because we are performers does not mean that life is easier for the Manhattan Brothers or myself. Nothing can change the fact that we are still black. The apartheid laws bind us just as tightly. In fact, life is even more difficult for us because we have to travel, eat at 248
restaurants, and stay at hotels all the time. Nathan makes sure that all our papers are in order. Still, this does not guarantee that we will not be harassed. One night we are traveling from Pretoria to Johannesburg. Our bus passes the International Airport, and a moment later we are stopped by the police. Two young men order us out. The policemen search the car, looking for anything from alcohol to weapons. Guns and knives are illegal for a black to possess, of course. The policemen are irritated that they cannot find anything. Nathan steps forward and says, “Here are our night passes” Nathan has made a bad mistake. He has spoken to the policemen in English. There are no English policemen, only Afrikaners, and they hate the English. We hold our breaths. The young policeman is stern. “Can’t you speak Afrikaans?” Nathan apologizes. He explains who we are and says we are returning from a performance. It is sad to see this tall, proud, and handsome man forced to humble himself before two blond pimple‐
heads in uniform. “You say you are a singing group?” one of the policemen asks in a sarcastic manner. I wonder what is going to happen, since he can do anything he pleases with us. “Okay, then,” he says, “sing.” And they make us sing. The Manhattan Brothers, one of the country’s top groups, is forced to stand beside the road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, and serenade two arrogant white 249
kids who are probably police because they’re too dumb to be anything else. Nothing is more humiliating than this. The police are enjoying their play. They finally wave us away when they are bored with us. We are stopped twice more that night before we make it back home. At least we do not have to perform again. Many times we are stopped so the police can inspect our night passes. Even tough we always take the precaution of having these, a policeman in a bad mood sometimes says, “We’re going to lock you up.” It’s useless to protest, unless you want to get beaten. I end up in jail a lot. It is really bad when it happens on a Friday night. The courts are not in session until Monday. We must spend the weekend in jail. Our Saturday night performances have to be canceled, and we all lose the income. When Monday comes, we stand before the magistrate. Depending on his mood, we must pay a fine or face a jail sentence. There are times when each African wonders how much longer we can stand living the way we do, as subhumans. The whites do not want to treat us like human beings because it is easier to keep us know if they think we are animals. But we know we are human beings. We know we are as good as anybody. We also know that something got to happen. There is only so much anger, resentment, pain, and fear that can build up in a person before there is an explosion. One night we perform at a place where some men are meeting to try to keep that explosion from happening. They want change, but change through nonviolent means. I recognize the group’s flag with I enter the hall. Its three colors are black, green, and gold. The black represents the African people. The green is for our fertile country. And the gold represents our land’s great mineral wealth. Black, green, and gold: the colors of Africa, and the colors of the African 250
National Congress. Over forty years ago the ANC was founded by the same type of black lawyers and educators who are meeting this day. After the Manhattan Brothers perform, we are introduced to them. I am very shy. Politics is something I know nothing about. I curtsy and do not look the men directly in the face when we shake hands. There is a bearded young man with a kind, round face to whom I show the same respect. His name is Nelson Mandela, and he says he enjoys my singing. I thank him and quickly leave, because everyone is busy with something called the Freedom Charter. In this document these men are about to declare: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” This is revolutionary. I fear the government is going to shoot them all. The fame of the Manhattan Brothers spreads beyond the country’s borders. Nathan arranges for us to tour Swaziland, Lesotho, and the Portuguese colony of Lourenco Marques. Lesotho is our first stop; an easy trip because the little British protectorate is completely surrounded, like a dot, by South Africa. In Lesotho blacks are permitted to drink all the alcohol they want. This doesn’t mean much to me, because I don’t drink. I guess all that beer I had to make for my mother‐in‐law made me dislike the stuff. But the musicians have a real good time after the show. We drive back to the South African border, and the bus is loaded down with bottles. Of course, the customs police won’t let us in with the loot. “You can’t come in here with that. Either you leave it here and go inside, or else back you go.” No one wants to part with a single bottle. The band piles back into the bus, we drive back into Lesotho for a mile, and then everyone sits down on the ground and starts to drink up everything they bought. I can only stand by and watch what happens. Plenty does. The Manhattan Brothers get so stoned! Somebody starts a fight, and I have never seen a fight last so long. The musicians, the singers, 251
everybody is in it. Some try to step in and stop the fight and they get a punch. They punch back and now they are a part of it. I am going from group to group, trying to get out of the way, but saying, How are we going to get home?” Nobody pays me any mind. We spend the night here in this field, in the middle of nowhere. Everyone is either too stoned or too bruised to continue. I sit in the bus that night curled up in a blanket. The boys straggle in the next morning, all these puffed‐up faces and black eyes. Everyone laughs about it, but it will be a funny‐looking group at tonight’s performance. The longest tour that we make starts in the countries of Southern and Northern Rhodesia and ends up in the Belgian Congo. This is the type of Africa the West likes to think of when someone mentions our continent: dense jungle, wild animals, miles and miles of unspoiled forests. But we are not tourists, we are traveling professionals, and the going is very rough. We travel by train and car. Many nights we have to sleep along the side of the road in our car when the driver is tired. The windows are always tightly rolled up, because we are strangers here and we are never certain whether we are in a game park or not. In the darkness I hear the monkeys chatter and a lion roar. Lions eat at night. The men tell me not to be nervous, but even to them a lion is no joke. By day we pass the herds of giraffes and springboks, the elephants and gazelles. And then, just where the forests of Rhodesia are the thickest and the monkeys are the noisiest, the car turns a corner and there I am: ten feet high, smiling from a great big billboard with a bottle of Coca‐Cola in my hand. I have seen this picture all over South Africa. But here? The advertising men never told me it would go this far. They came to see me at the recording company and offered me 150 pounds. I was not going to turn down that much money. My daughter Bongi saw these billboards around town, and, 252
very excited she came home to tell me how happy she is to have a famous mother. I had to smile, because I was down on my hands and knees at the time scrubbing the kitchen floor. This is the way I like my life, though. And there is excitement and adventure in my days that I never dreamed of. This day, for instance, we take a break from our tour of Rhodesia and go to the famous Victoria Falls. We make our way down to the bottom, which is a very difficult journey. I have never seen anything like this great waterfall. The ground shakes beneath our feet. The sheer, vertical drop of white water reaches all the way up into the sky. We just stand, look, and listen. The Superior Being is always with us, but there are places where he really lets you know it. Nathan, Ronnie, Rufus, I, and the others write our names on the rocks beneath Victoria Falls. I wonder how long our names will last. It doesn’t matter. Our lives are so short compared to the falls, which will go on and on. But for now, here is little Miriam Makeba, writing her name on a rock. I am twenty‐two years old. If you want, you can buy my records. You can hear me on the radio or see me give a show with the Manhattan Brothers. And I’ll look right back at you from the pages of a magazine or from a billboard with a bottle of Coca‐Cola in my hand! Who would have ever imagined that any of this could happen so fast, and all at once? I forgive myself if I enjoy it, because there is too much danger and oppression in my country to think that any of it will last. 253
Chapter 19 Who The Hell Is This Newcomer by Godfrey Moloi 254
The township was singing ‘Nonsokol’egoli’—Ben Mngadi and the Otto Town gang—Time of the gmbagumba—Lucky the Spade—Nice Time Sweepers versus ‘Pass zonke!’—‘Many are invited but few are chosen’—I meet the Cuba Brothers—Moffat ungu—Dodgers and doorkeepers—The Prehistoric Men—‘Every man out the way he came in’—Yster baadjies, dambuzas, and voetsaks—2 p.m. at the Rio—‘The Scaramouche’—If it’s a boy I’ll call him Jomo—The Manhattans, the Ink Spots, and the young Gibson Kente—The little girl who carried my trumpet case—‘Julie raas vir die baas’—The final scene at Climax Clothing. In the train Cleopas and I swapped farm stories about the birds and the bees and the Gumedes until we fell asleep, now and then disturbed by noises we didn’t bother to investigate and shaken each time the wheels of the train hit a cross track. We got to Voksrust and the electric engine gave way to a locomotive which puffed through the rest of the night until, like a tired black monster, it drew slowly into Platform Twelve, Park Station, at 6:30 a.m. Johannesburg on that Tuesday morning in 1952. The place looked a little faster, a little busier. What was I expecting? I remembered how in December 1948 I had attended a students’ reception which also marked the opening of the Donaldson Orlando Community Centre (D.O.C.C.), a night not to be forgotten In that show we had the Manhattan Brothers led by Nathan (Dambuza) Mdledle, the Black Broadway Boys led by Mahlasela, and Thandi Mpambane singing the Cow Cow boogie which earned her the name Thandi Cow Cow. Now this veteran singer is known as Thandi Klaasen. That was the night I saw Chips Mazambane doing his thing on the dance floor, and heard songs like “A Dipsie Doodle’, ‘Captain Rhythm’ and a lot more old‐
time goodies. Those were the memories that came to my mind as I alighted from the ‘Mafufunyane’ train at Orlando Station, going into the subway and out on the western side. I went down the footpath that led past where 255
the Pelican Club is today, to the little river where I had to pay to get across the ‘Penny Bridge’. On the other side the streets around Number Three Shelters reminded you of some scene in busy Calcutta, India. Now the girls were wearing figure belts, bobby socks, brown and white golf shoes and gabardine skirts. The township was singing ‘Nonsokol’egoli’. I went through and up Nomali Avenue, a short passage which went past Nomali Msheng’s shebeen to 7795 Phomolong where I had come to stay with my uncle, Patrick Moloi. This passage still exists today. One thing I noticed when I got to my uncle’s place was a speaker at the top corner of the house which played continuous black radio programmes, whereas I had only known the programme which played on medium wave daily from 9.00 to 9.30 a.m. This new development was called Radifusion (Umsakazo). I vividly remember some of the announcers of the time like Gideon Nxumalo, Stanley Nkosi and Stanley Mtshali, whom I saw this morning in Ptchefstroom Road stopping traffic for the children to cross. He is now some second‐hand traffic cop. Without anybody seeing me, I unwrapped the Natal Witness newspaper which had contained the nice boiled chicken my mother had given me as provision. My gun was there, the one I got during the ‘Indian Riots’ of 1949 at Umkhumbane. I had hidden it inside the chicken carcass. I again chose a brick in the wall and hid it there. I did not know anybody I Orlando West at that time. I had last known the area as a barren wasteland where we used to catch locusts (I’ntethe) way back when I was a pupil at St. Mary’s Primary School. Now it was a built‐up area with a railway station of its own. So I crossed the line to the east, the place I knew better. I got to Orlando East to find that all the people and things I enquired about were already history. Most of the people had left the neighbourhood or were dead. This was bad. 256
The Otto Town gang was riding the crest in this area. I met Ben Mngadi the Indian whom I knew from Pietermaritzburg. Let me tell you a little story about Ben Mngadi the Indian. One day in Pietermaritzburg, Ben and I went to look for a job at a certain bakery in Longmarket Street. The foreman there, who was an Indian, cam out to us and told me, ‘Hay khona lo msebenzi.’ That meant there was no work. He then turned to my friend Ben and said something in an Indian language. I expected Ben to say something, but to my surprise he said, ‘Leli’ Kula lidakiwe’ meaning this Indian is drunk. We walked away. I asked Ben what the man had said to him. He got cross and told me to ask him myself. This was a big joke when I related the story to friends. Actually there was no job for me, but the Indian foreman had a job for his Indian brother, Ben. Unfortunately Ben was only Indian by looks, otherwise he was a pure raw Zulu. He never understood a cough of Indian. That’s it. But now, in Orlando East, Ben Mngadi was a full member of the Otto Town gang. Of the gang I can mention quite a few like Otto, Mabling, Nkani, Exchange, Thupi, Gwiks, Maphondo, Lucky (Spade) and makerest the gumbagumba man. All thieves, robbers and killers, not one of this bunch would ail to give you, on the strength of his half‐a‐
mile‐long police record, the inside map in detail of the famous ‘No. 4’ (the Johannesburg Fort prison). It was the time of the gumbagumba—a dance session which began with a tent in someone’s yard; a few benches provided seating facilities. Music was provided by a gramophone connected to an amplifier and a speaker. In Orlando East, Makerese was the man to contact when you wanted to have that gumbagumba music. He owned one of these combinations and could produce quite a sound. The difficulty in these sessions was that the operator had to be next to the gramophone all the time in case of scratches on the record. There was also the risk of getting the records broken or stolen. Changing 257
the stylus was a problem on its own, the stylus so minute and the box in which it was packaged so small you could hardly push your two fingers in. While you fiddled to get the stylus out, some off‐course dancer would bump you or the table by accident, throwing the box to the ground and scattering its contents on the dust floor. How hard it would be to find those needles in the dimly‐lit tent. The operator also had to keep the record turning by hand, winding the gramophone. But the worst moment was when the motor‐car battery which provided power to the amplifier got flat. The poor music‐maker had to carry the battery on his shoulder to get it charged some distance away. There would be no music for some time. Home brew was sold at these sessions in scales made up from Illovo Syrup containers selling for ‘one‐up a time’ (one shilling a scale). The brew was usually the favourite umqombothi (‘sqo’ for short). It was not advisable to sit close to the wall of the tent in these gigs because you ran the risk of ending up with a Three Star knife sticking out of your back. Besides the usual Glen Miller music played in these places there were also tunes of the moment like ‘Hamba nonsokol’egoli’ and Alpheus Nkosi’s ‘Lizzy Lizzy Wam’’. I was never a trouble‐seeker in my time till today. Now this town was driving me into what I was trying hard to avoid. It was rough times and survival called for toughness. I remember walking with some girl by the name of Milela when Lucky the Spade appeared and shouted, ‘Wat maak jy met die worsie? What are you doing with that bum? I was on him in a second. He was out of circulation for a considerably longer time. This was the time of the most terrible thing ever created by man against man, the ‘Mureksie’ or ‘Section’, the Pass Raid. It was an enormous task to acquire your pass and keep it satisfying to the demander, the cop. There used to be these raids any time, anywhere. I remember there was a football game arranged between our club, the 258
Nice Time Sweepers of Otto Town, and the South African Police from Orlando Police Station. These games went on quite well, drawing good crowds. They were played on Wednesdays on the grounds just opposite the Police Station, and behind the Donaldson. All would go well if the cops had the upper hand or a draw was on the cards, but once the score climbed too high in favour of the Sweepers, the cops would immediately announce that they were on duty and start demanding. One of them would shout, ‘Pass zonke!’ and hell would break loose as we all ran in different directions for safety. The players would lose their belongings in the chaos, and obviously the game would draw rapidly to a close. As early as six o’clock in the morning the cops used to congregate at the station subways. One would approach the station unawares and go into the subway where things happened. The scriptures say, ‘Baningi abamenyiweyo kodwa bancane abakhethiweyo. Many are invited but few are chosen’ So it was with our subway. Very few came out compared to those who went in. Many times I, too, was a victim of this devilish thing. I was ordered to get proof of where I attended school, which I got from St. Mary’s. That didn’t help. I was ordered out of Johannesburg within 72 hours just because I had been to college in Natal. I struggled for a long time before I got my dirty pass. Aunt Norah, the mother of my cousin Dululu, helped me a lot during my struggle for it. I won’t forget her. I had no job but I had to live. I met a friend, Maurel Msimang, whom I knew through the Msimangs of Edendale in Pietermaritzburg. He took me to D.O.C.C. one Sunday morning. Maurel now works for Heyns Films. That morning as we walked into Donaldson I heard the tune ‘Shiy’umhlaba ne’nto zawo’. It was the Cuba Brothers in those three beautiful voices of Zweli, Peter and Robbie. Their pianist was the capable John Dlamini. That day I also saw the Gay Rubineers 259
under Bra Fats Ngwabeni whom I knew very well. He was a prefect way back at Indaleni High School in my school days. Here I was, now, in the game I liked best—music, not fights. Maurel introduced me to Zweli Ngwenya who led the Cuba Brothers, telling him how good I was on the trumpet. John, their pianist, was playing some eight‐bar sequence on the keyboard when I saw a trumpet lying on a chair and grabbed it. I moistened my lips, found the key, which was B Flat, and joined in beautifully to the little crowd’s delight. The bass player joined in and then the drummer. We matched nicely. Soon people were jiving while others were busy asking each other, ‘Who the hell is this newcomer?’ After that little jam, Zweli, who by now had taken a liking to me, and said he would introduce me to some guy who had sung with them previously. Zweli hoped this guy would put me through with a trumpet. We got to this man’s room, which was built of tin and cardboard, in the backyard of a two‐roomed house a few streets from Donaldson. His cardboard walls were decorated with pictures of nudes, pin‐ups and jazz artists like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and a few more. I was impressed. But to my disappointment this punk only scanned me from top to bottom with his wide eyes. I think he saw some nasty creature in me because he never gave us any reception at all. We went out with our tails between our legs. This man was Mr. Moffat Zungu who later became one of the country’s best press photographers. Then he entangled himself in politics and picked up a long period on Robben Island. He is out now. I saw him last month, staying in Meadowlands. I later got myself a second‐hand, much‐dented Conn from Magnet Music Saloon and joined the Cuba Brothers playing background. We went on very well, though riding the crest at that time were of course the Manhattan Brothers, the Ink Spots and the Broadway Brothers. 260
There used to be jive sessions on Fridays, concert dances on Saturdays, and concerts on Sundays. The admission fee was usually two and six (25 cents). Some of us would sand outside the door of the hall for the whole night just because we didn’t have that two and six. Quite nasty scenes usually occurred between these non‐payers and the doorkeepers. Let me tell you another one. A lady singer of the time, by the name of Martha Mdenge, had two brothers who were twins. I called them The Prehistoric Men. They were short, squat, and not on very good terms with their bath flannels. They walked bare‐footed and their step was the short‐stroke shuffle. Their faces were covered with rich vegetation; they had never learned to recognize the barber’s striped pole nor did they know about the comb. They were Bra Sipho and Bra Mzamo. One night at the D.O.C.C. Bra Sipho was the doorkeeper. The Harlem Swingsters were on the stage. He had a sjambok and had promised the promoter that he was going to clean up the place of non‐paying tsotsis. He almost did it, too, because he demanded proof of admission when you were as far as twenty yards from the door or even in the toilets. If you did not have a ticket, you were in for a real hiding from his sjambok. This went on for quite a long time. The place was next to clean though nobody wanted to call it quits and go home. ‘Ek moer hulle almal, van hier af tot daar by die deur,’ he kept on saying There was a certain Joe Phungula—we called him Mighty Joe Young—a well‐built weightlifter. He was also at the hall that night. A little boy came to Joe and asked for some money so he could pay at the door. While Joe was fiddling in his pockets for the money, Bra Sipho was suddenly there, throwing his sjambok wildly at the little boy plus Joe. This was enough. Joe got hold of the sjambok plus Sipho, lifted him voetstoets high up and dropped him hard on the floor, really breaking his cool. Sipho didn’t think he could take 261
anymore, so he broke loose and ran for his life out of the hall, through the restaurant, and out into the street. It was drizzling outside and the street was a bit muddy. A taxi had stopped and a well‐dressed couple were just turning towards the steps when Sipho burst out of the door. He threw a powerful right as he came, catching the unsuspecting gentleman in his white Mirror Test suite on the jaw and dropping him like a mealie bag in the mud. He jumped over him and continued his run up the street, shouting, ‘Jou broers, hulle moer my daar binnekant!’ That was it. . . . These admission fee dodgers were quite a problem at the dance sessions. I remember some used to get into the gallery inside the hall, which was not used during such functions. It was easy to get in there without entering the main hall. Inside the hall there was a long, sturdy pole that was used to open and close the high windows. One thug would pay his admission fee and enter lawfully. Then, unnoticed, he would take this pole and position it firmly against the gallery wall. The dodgers, having gained entry into the unused gallery, would slide down the pole, land on the dance floor below, and immediately join the dancers in step. Everybody would be too busy to notice the swelling inflow. Next thing there would be nobody hanging around outside the door and the hall would be full. Among doorkeepers I remember Radibi ‘Skipper’ Moalusi. He has now lost one of his limbs and stays in Phomolong. That time he was very tough and well‐built and packed a powerful punch. People talked about the time he dropped a guy by the name of Fox Murukujue. Skipper’s blow landed on Fox’s jaw with such an explosion you could hear just from the sound that plenty damage was caused. And sure enough Fox spent a long time nursing that broken jaw. 262
Now one night at the Donaldson, Skipper was the doorkeeper. He also had a sjambok that night. He walked about mingling with the dancers, asking to see the mark which was stamped on our arm as proof of admission. If the tsotsi did not have that stamp, Skipper was on him with the sjambok, chasing him around the hall and insisting that he leave—but not through the door this time. ‘Every man must go out the way he came in!’ was Skipper’s rule that night. This was a real problem for anyone who had slid down the pole. Trying not to get involved in these skirmishes and to keep out of trouble, I made the most of my chances as a spectator. I sat pretty on my expensive ringside chair. Now the boys were wearing the’yster baadjie’, a khaki jacket; the ‘dambuza’, a black fisheman’s cap; and ‘voetsaks’, a kind of half boot with car‐tyre soles, which has ended up as a standard shoe for the Z.C.C. clan to this day. The favourite bioscopes were the Harlem next to Faraday Station, the Casablanca in Malay Camp (Ferrreirastown), the Broadway in Fordsburg, the UNO or the Good Hope in Commissioner Street, and the Rio as it stands today. In these places you’d find the tsotsi at his best on Saturday afternoons as he came down dressed to kill with his moll to the 2 p.m. show. On one of these afternoons I walked down to the Rio. Just at the corner of Market and Mooi I met a girl, and immediately made advances. I invited her to show and paid admission for her. We went in, and were enjoying the show. There was a smell of dagga in the bioscope. I did not like it as I was no dagga smoker. One thug from the row of seats behind us tapped me on the shoulder but I ignored him as I was busy exploring the wonders of God’s creation with my hand. The thug tapped me again, a bit harder now. I turned around and he handed me a long zol of dagga. I shook my head, indicating I didn’t use the stuff, but he hurriedly indicated that I should pass it to another guy in the next row in front of me. Just as I took the zol and 263
tapped the guy in front of me, I was blinded by the light of a torch all over my face. I tried to look in the direction the light came from, at the same time shaking the jacket of the man in front of me, who seemed not to be taking any notice. A loud voice was saying, ‘Jy, jy met die tarrie, kom hierso. You with the dagga come here!’ I tried to hand it back to the owner, who was now concentrating on the picture in such a way that you could feel you were disturbing him and that he had never been involved in what was happening. The voice repeated, ‘Hey, tsotsi, kom met die dagga, jong!” I stood u and went in the direction of the voice, hoping to explain. What happened? I was grabbed by my yster baadjie collar and thrown out. I tried to explain what had happened but nobody would listen to me. I waited outside for some time hoping my girl‐friend would come out, but she probably wasn’t the faithful type. I lost my money and my new girl before I even knew her name. We all meet our friends in different ways. I think of one man in particular who was to be a friend to me for a long time. We had the fullest respect for each other—actually I think the relationship was based more on respect than friendship. I had known him since the days he attended school at Musi High, Pimville. I felt pity for this youth as I knew his father to be a blind man who spent his life weaving baskets and selling them to make a living and to educate the boy. This young man was Shangaan, and in those days Shangaans were taken to be an inferior race. They were always ridiculed and scorned at, given silly names like ‘mkongwane’, ‘mafikizolo’ and even associated with some cheap polony called ‘mashangani wors’. It is also worth remembering for the sake of the story I have to tell, that these were the times of ‘sword hero’ movies like The Three Musketeers, The Mark of Zorro, and, especially, Scaramouche. 264
This young man joined the Orlando Boys Club where physical training was supervised by the toughie mentioned earlier, “Skipper Dollies” Moalusi. This club brewed a bunch of youngsters who earned it the name of the ‘Rough House’. The boy I am talking about was the most competent pupil of this institute and that paid him dividends All of a sudden he became very pugnacious, got involved in fights almost every weekend, and started climbing the ladder to fame. This two‐fisted little devil started beating up guys left, right and centre. Smelling, victory, he started raiding gambling schools, picking up fights there and winning them. He made himself a ‘sword’ from thick wire and carried it with him on his raids. He would pounce on his victims, whip them with this wire, and challenge anyone who trusted himself to come for a fair fight—
which, for sure, he would proceed to win. From this sword he gained himself the name and actually called himself The Scaramouche. He was now a threat even to the bigger boys. I had liked the boy, but now I didn’t trust him. So I avoided contact with him, making it obvious that I didn’t like to mix with him. He sensed my attitude and started doing silly things to me in the dance hall, like bumping me while jiving or pretending to stumble against me. I didn’t like to engage myself in fights anymore, but this I didn’t like either. I told Maurel Msimang about this. Maurel called on him and told him of my feelings, telling him how I would like to keep away from trouble and asking him to keep away from me. I thought this mad lunatic would explode, and I was ready. But to my surprise this man became so frank and told me how he had always envied me and had seen that I was avoiding him, so he wanted a way to gain me. What a straight talker. I still didn’t trust him for a while, until he proved himself beyond doubt. From then on I respected this man wholly and he did just that to me in return. In all the troubles I got engaged in, no matter how angry I was, if he asked me to stop, I would stop. The 265
same with him. There was no man I respected like him. I was very sorry when he died. From his Scaramouche days nobody ever ridiculed this man. Nobody called him names. I tell you, people were even scared to use the word ‘Shangaan’ in his presence. I actually believe that he is the man who freed all Shangaans from being looked down upon. This an was none other than Eric Bamuza Scaramouche Sono, later known as just ‘Scara’. I remember we both went to look for a job at the United Tobacco Company at the same place where you will find it today, in Crooesus. The induna asked us for qualifications. I told him of my standard of education thinking I’d make it as I was a little above my friend Eric Sono. But to my surprise he got the job and I failed. Why? Only because he told the induna he played football. He worked for this company for a long time, till he left it for the Badge Company in Mayfair. Around about then he got himself a girl at some mine village called Mavumbuka. It was the time of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. One day Moola, as I called him, told me his girl‐friend was expecting a baby and he was hoping the baby would be a boy. He went on to tell me he had prepared the name, which would be Jomo Kenyatta. If you don’t get my drift, ask a football fanatic what I mean. . . . I got a job at the Climax Clothing factory, 22 High Road, Fordsburg. This was my first job in Jo’burg. I worked with a boy called Mafisto. I’ve never really got to know his proper name. He is still alive—I saw him last week. This Mafisto picked a liking for me. We drank maiza together. The word came from mai mai, some municipal brew pumped from big tanks in the beer halls and sold for as little as a tickey a scale. At the time you could only find it at three beer halls—
Von Wielligh Street, Western Township, and Eastern Township. We also drank ‘sqo’, or home brew, at Nuku’s joint in No. 2 Shelters. 266
My main interest now was music. I played and composed for the Cuba Brothers and we staged shows throughout the Reef. But I still envied the big guys, the Manhattans who were backed by big guns like McKay Davashe, Kippie Moeketsi, Mzala Lepere, Willie Malang, Grey Mbawu, and of course, the General Duze. Most of these guys are dead now, except General. I am sure of this because I met him today. Hey, that reminds me of another man I must never fail to mention. I never saw him play an instrument nor have I heard him sing. But this man was and is still fantastic. He is none other than the Honourable Mr. Gibson Kente. You know, this man was already such a good composer—way back in those heydays. He used to compose for groups like the said Manhattan Brothers. I recall one of his works I so loved, a religious song with the title ‘All Are Welcome in Heaven Above, All the Young and Big and Small’. I take off my hat to this man whose religious leaning shines through to this day in his renowned musical plays. There came up the Ink Spots with Elijah Nkwanyane, the golden trumpeter from Payneville in Springs. I remember their famous signature tune ‘Ndibe Nomona Ngawa’. Oh, let’s forget. It’s true past days never return. Those were the times. That was ‘TJ’. The Cuba Brothers staged shows at Victory Hall, Atteridgeville, in Lady Selborne, in Eerstrerus. We stayed with Zweli’s aunt when we ere in Eersterus. His aunt was a sangoma who had living with her a little girl, he daughter. I remember the five‐roomed house built of mud which was rather too big for this family. This little girl used to bring us washing water each day in a rusted basin, its bottom patched with blue soap. One by one we took turns in washing. I always preferred to take the last turn, telling them they had to be ready first because they were the vocalists. As a matter of fact, you know, I wanted to have a little 267
chance to throw a word or two, you know, to the eh, eh, I mean to the cousin, the little girl. The next thing, I was the one who accompanied her on her errands, to the shops and so on; and she was the one who carried my trumpet case as we walked back from shows. I also had my shirt and undies washed for me, privately of course. And eventually we took to disappearing among the shacks now and again after everyone was asleep. We went on quite well with this lady who occasionally joined us in song when we rehearsed at her home. Wow, she had a beautiful voice. I eventually persuaded her and encouraged her to come to Johannesburg and sing with us as our lady vocalist. She liked the idea. How were we to tell Zweli, and how to leave her mother alone? But I was now the boy‐friend and she the girl‐friend. It just had to happen my way. Our love was quite exciting, me and this girl. She told me a lot of stories, the most interesting of which was that she had a gun hidden somewhere. She told me she got it from some Chinaman. I didn’t bother to know how this came about; my interest was to get it. It didn’t tax me much effort to persuade her into it, so we went and dug it out and now I had another gun. After the string of shows we staged in that area we came back to TJ wit her and she stayed at Zweli’s place just above the Donaldson. She became our lady vocalist, and she was to go places. Her name was Miss Miriam ‘Zenzi’ Makheba. This surname only came about because the whites couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘g’ properly in this instance. The true name is Miss Miriam ‘Mazenze’ Mageba. I remember one day. We had finished rehearsals at D.O.C.C. and were on our way to Orlando West. It was a Wednesday and we were crossing the railway line just next to Orlando Station. It was Zweli, John, Peter, Miriam and me. We saw two railway policemen running towards us. Zweli said they were coming to arrest us. I asked him 268
why. He told me, for crossing the line. I said no ways. He went on to say, let’s run for it, I said what about my girl. Just then they caught up with us. And for sure we were taken not very smoothly to their office on the station platform. A bully white cop sat behind a big desk. He looked at us as if he held a university degree in The Inspection of Toilets. ‘Wat is julle name?’ ‘Waar is julle pasboekies?’ ‘Waar werk julle?’ ‘Ons werk nie, my baas,’ said Zweli. ‘Wat doen julle dan?’ ‘Ons e‐e‐e, sing, my baas.’ ‘Nou ja, sing dan, sing!’ What could we do We started to sing but were told to sing in turns. Zweli started his solo only to be told he was ‘making noise’ and ordered out. Next was Miriam. She bailed us out because I heard one say, ‘God, die meid kan sing! Sing weer.’ Oh Lord, what a job. But eventually it was, ‘Gaan julle, uit, julle raas vir die baas.’ Just imagine. Back at work at Climax Clothing, it was the 12th of December, closing day for the festive season, and Mr. Kay had thrown a party for his employees. There were all sorts of drinks. I had never seen such a variety. Everybody was in high spirits. The party really went well. By about twoish people were very drunk and some were even vomiting. Some were already on their way home, mixing with crowds from the other factories on our street, when I saw Mafisto being assaulted by one Daniel who was our induna at work. Mafisto was bleeding badly. I had had a little bit too much myself, my belly was full of brandy, but this I did not like. I tried to reason with this big guy who was a second‐hand boxer to let go of Mafisto, but instead the punk caught me with a terrible right to the jaw that dropped me hard on my bum—to the delight of the little crowd that had begun to gather as he assaulted Mafisto. I stood up but he dropped me again, polishing his Edwin Clippe a few times at my expense. This was bad. I was in trouble again. This man was far stronger and experienced in this kind of thing. I couldn’t land a single punch on him. On the other hand, he was landing them on me at random, and for sure he was enjoying the 269
situation. He had completely forgotten about Mafisto now and was concentrating on me. Have you ever seen a cat playing with a half unconscious mouse, tossing it around? That was what Dan was doing to me. Each time he landed a blow the girls would scream ‘Yoh!’ and the boys would shout ‘Moer ‘om!’ I tried to run for it but the guy tripped me from behind and I fell. Eventually I managed to run into a nearby shop. He tried to follow me but was blocked by the shopkeeper at the door. This gave me some breathing time. You know, this guy was real strong. I had been able to see his big fist coming, and had picked my guard, but the force of his blows had gone right through me, guard and all. Inside the shop I saw a board with a few McGregors marked two and six each—this was a pocket knife with a handle decorated in Scottish colours. I grabbed one of these and went back out into the street. I was covered in blood by now and still bleeding badly. I shouted his name and screamed my battle cry. The crowd gave way. They seemed to pave a long winding passage to my man. He threw one punch, I went under it and in so close to the punk I could smell him. I thrust my blade into his side and held on. He jumped high, taking me with him, but mother gravity pulled us down. I held on. He tried all the tricks in the book of punks to shake me off but I was stuck to him like a flea on a dog’s hide. Now he was bellowing like a mourning ox as I twisted the steel in his innards. Now the boys were shouting, ‘Steek hom!’ The boss, Mr. Ka, came down and kicked me in my ribs. I let go of Dan and chased my employer around he crowds. Now everybody was running in different directions. I was soaked with blood, both mine and Dan’s. I was in a trance. I drove Dan, boss, the lot into the 270
factor where they locked themselves in the office. I pointed my knife at them, warned them, and left. I went up Central Avenue in the direction of Mayfair Station. I could see people coming towards me as they walked on the pavement, then dissolving as they saw the mess I was in and crossed to the other side of the street to avoid me. On the way I decided against Mayfair Station, thinking of the people in the train and the police. Instead I crossed the line and went to my uncle Abednigo’s place in 24th Street, Vrededorp ‘Feed us’, we called it). This was trouble. The cops would be after me and Godfrey Moloi was on the run again. Fortunately, I had just got my back‐pay. By the following week I was back in my old stamping ground, Sobantu Village. 271
Chapter 20 The Road To Holly Cross by Maggie Resha When I was about ten or eleven years of age, my aunt decided that I should go back to live with my parents. One of the main reasons was that there was a better school, with classes up to Standard VI, near my parents’ home at Ramohlakoana. By now they had left St. James, but when that event took place I do not know. So here was my aunt preparing to send me to college, even though she was earning only fourteen shillings a month, working for a white shop‐keeper as a domestic servant and seamstress, when the school fees for most black colleges in those days was between £14 and £28 a year. By the time I got back to my home, my mother had four children. She used to complain that my aunt and my grandmother had spoilt me. Then, every school holiday I was on my way back to my grandmother’s place, about 70 miles away. I used to walk all that distance to go to report to her about how I was doing at school and about how I was being treated by my parents. My grandmother used to get furious; she begged me to leave the school and come back to 272
her, but my aunt disagreed with that; she was determined that I should go to college and become a teacher. Ramohlakoana school had many children—some had come from as far away as Lesotho, others from far‐away farms where there were no schools—and about six or seven teachers. The subjects taught were: English, Sesotho, Arithmetic, History, Geography, Physiology and Hygiene, Nature Study, Music, Sewing, Cookery. When the girls studied Sewing and Cookery, the boys engaged in sports. Girls also took part in sports after school. This was the time when I got my first pair of shoes and my first overcoat. Before that, we used to wear light‐weight blankets, called lepae, which were not to be used for sleeping, and which we would wash every Saturday. The principal of the school, who was very old at that time, was Mr. Ryne Thipa; it was said that he had taught my father. In 1939 I was sent to study for my Junior Certificate at the Welsh High School in East London, where I took English, Xhosa, Latin, Biology, Physiology and Hygiene, Cookery, History, Geography. Music and sports were also done, but not as subjects. Here I specially liked English, Latin and Biology. I was now sixteen years of age. Unfortunately, before I had completed my Standard VI, my aunt as well as my grandfather had died. Furthermore, on the insistence of the congregation, my father had to return to St. James to take my grandfather’s place as Catechist. Anyway, as father had been sickly since he had stopped working on the railways, and could not find other employment, this was a good idea, even though the stipend was very small. The mission, however, allowed him to hire four fields from its farm, and that was how he could maintain his family; the soil was fertile and produced good harvests. 273
My elder sister had, meanwhile, been sent to an industrial school, called St. Margaret’s; there she studied cookery, knitting and weaving. In those days, the most popular courses for girls were either industrial or teaching courses; the former was preferred because it was said to be useful, as it could be done at home. It was certainly going to be extremely difficult for our parents to educate the two of us. To do that they needed to sell grain and cattle, which my mother supplemented by doing a lot of sewing for people, often working well past midnight by candlelight or paraffin lamp. Luckily, when plans were well advanced, at the end of 1938, to send me to Mariazell College, my mother’s sister of the senior house offered that she could pay for my schooling in return for what my dead aunt had done for them. This offer was not well received by the rest of the Tsiu family, especially by my father’s mother, who tried hard to influence my father to reject the offer. Her main argument was that I was too young to go to such a far‐away place, and that they would never see me again. Although my father was inclined to agree with his mother, my mother did not want to hear a thing about such ‘useless obstructions’ as she put it. This was the time I saw the power of my mother. The arguments caused great tension in the family, and my father was torn between his mother and his wife. What was strange was that although we lived within a stone’s throw of each other, my grandmother did not want to discuss the matter with my mother, but only with her son. One day father came back from my grandmother with a new story. His mother thought, he said, that it was useless to send girls to school because they would soon get married without helping their parents. And, he said she had told him, Junior Certificate was ‘education for boys’; no girl from our area had ever undergone that education! My mother’s answer to that was that she wanted her daughter to be the first to take ‘boys’ education. 274
She was an extraordinary woman, my mother; not only was she an orator, but she was also very witty and hardworking. She was the power behind my father. Many people feared her because they knew she was a woman of no nonsense. The farmer’s daughter had, I think, learnt a great deal from her father. One of her tricks was hardly ever to leave out the words ‘the law says’ from her arguments. She was outstandingly rational. I must emphasize that both my parents were strict, but also gentle. I cannot remember either my elder sister or myself ever being punished. Both my father and mother disciplined us by explaining things to use thoroughly. The only one who was ever punished by my father was our brother Rantsiuoa, and that was for dodging church services. What had made him dodge going to church was that, after three services including Sunday School, father that evening, after prayers had asked us one by one what had been said in church. My brother hated this so much that he decided not to go to church at all. This became such a big case that it involved my grandmother as well, because my brother had gone to tell her that father had wanted to kill him. So grandmother came from her kraal, holding her walking stick, shouting: ‘Tsekiso, you must remember that Rantsiuoa is your grandfather. How dare you touch him!’ Father would usually have no chance of explaining, because of grandmother’s threats that she would take my brother to live with her. The custom that children should not talk back to mothers had the effect of cowing him. When we grew older, we (my brothers and sisters and myself) used to talk a great deal about our mother. We all thought that we owed her a lot for the sacrifices she made and the love she gave to us during our tender years. We were thankful that, by the time she died in 1985 when she was in her nineties) each one of us had tried in several ways to show how we thought that she was a ‘Golden 275
Mother’. I was very sad that I was the only one who could not be present to lay her to rest. The day I left to go to school in East London, my father, together with two of my cousins, took me on horseback to the station. I was to take the railway bus to the town of Maclear, (where I spent the night sleeping on a bench in the waiting room) and from there take a train to Sterkstroom, where it would connect with another train from Johannesburg to East London. Although I was frightened at the thought of making such a long journey for the first time, I traveled in a motor vehicle and later, for the first time, I traveled in a motor vehicle and later, for the first time, in a train. Our main means of transport in those days was our own feet; for the lucky ones (who might be one in a thousand) there were other forms like horseback, ox‐wagon, or horse‐drawn carts. The sound of the thumping of the wheels of the train on the rails enchanted me. I also looked out of the window the whole time to watch the engine or to count the number of carriages whenever the train took a curve. I really enjoyed it. I remember that I was given sixpence for pocket money, an this made me very happy. I also had with me two roasted chickens, two loaves of bread, and two bottles of homemade ginger beer and some peaches in my provision basket. Anyway, one of the chickens went bad and I had to throw it out of the window. It took three or four days (I cannot remember exactly) to get to East London. I do remember, however, that at Sterkstroom I slept in an empty carriage, waiting or the train from Johannesburg, which was due only the next morning. When I told a guard who had come to lock the doors about nine p.m. that I was going to East London the next day and that there were no waiting‐rooms, he said that I should come to sleep in his carriage. This offer I declined; I did not trust this white man. The station was deserted, and I prayed to God to protect me that night. 276
The train from Johannesburg arrived early the next morning, while it was still dark. I had not slept well on the hard wooden bench, on which I ha tucked myself in my traveling rug with one flap on the bench, with the other covering my body, fully dressed. I got up immediately and, taking my little suitcase, I boarded the train. This time the Third Class carriages had cushions. I was now feeling great‐I was actually going to be traveling on the much talked about train from Johannesburg! The next station on from Sterkstroom and I could hear only Xhosa, n more Sesotho. So I realized that I was now in the land of the amaXhosa. I was fetched by two girls at East London station, it presented a bit of a problem; they knew not a world of Sesotho, and I understood only very little Xhosa. However, all went well. ‘As long as I do not get lost’, I said to myself. I think I arrived in East London on a Saturday, because on the following day we went to church with the other girls. On the Monday, when I got to school, I had no problem about talking to the teachers; they spoke to me in English. However, as all the other pupils were Xhosa‐speaking, I was soon the centre of attraction, everybody wanting to talk to me in their language. Every day there were groups of students around me, wanting me to talk, some actually laughing at my pronunciation of Xhosa words But, they, too, could not pronounce Tsiu properly; some called me ‘Tseo’. The principal of the school was a Dr. Wollheim, while our teachers were young black graduates from Fort Hare. The most senior was a Mr. Ebenza Majombozi, who had been Principal before the arrival of Dr. Wollheim. In fact, I soon found out that Mr. Majombozi had founded the school; it was said that he had started it by teaching (in his house) some pupils who had been unable to go to boarding school, but hat he was soon overwhelmed by the numbers of pupils. The East London City Council then allowed him to use its large Peacock Hall for holding classes while a new school was built across 277
the valley on a site about two miles away. Indeed, we moved into the new school building towards the end of that year. On the walls of he Peacock Hall were huge framed photographs of four African men: Rev. Rubusana; Mr. Mapikela; Mr. Godlo; Dr. Aggrey. Each student seemed to venerate these pictures; we were told that these were the men who were fighting for the liberation of Africa. This was the first time since my grandmother had told me, when I was a child, about how our country had been taken away from us, that I had heard hat there were Africans who were fighting for the restoration of our land. Before we moved to the new school, we had a meeting of all the pupils, at which Dr. Wollheim asked us to choose a name for it, because it had had no name before. One student, Loli Jamela, who was in her IVth year, proposed the name of ‘Majombozi High School’ because of the work that teacher had done for the school. This was promptly seconded, but the Principal explained to us that we needed the name of a well‐known person so that our school could get help from white people. He recommended ‘Welsh High School’. I do not know if the majority of us were already brain‐washed to believe that our prime interest was that the school should get donations from rich white people, but we all cheered the Principal for his proposal. Later on, we all started to blame each other for rejecting the name of the man who had taken the initiative to uplift his people with much devotion and under enormous difficulties. Mr. Majombozi left at the end of the term; later we learnt that he had opened another school somewhere in Ciskei. Still later, when I began to take part in politics, I regarded Mr. Majombozi as a hero, because in fighting for your country and your people education is a weapon as powerful as a gun. Indeed, the successes and failures of a country depend largely upon education. I still feel a sense of guilt that there 278
was not even a reception or a card sent in his honour to this son of Africa, who loved, and fought for his people so much. The opening of our new school building was a great occasion. For many months we had been feverishly practicing entertainment activities such as sketches, music, poetry and folklore dances. Many personalities, both black and white, had been invited. The teachers all wore their graduation gowns, which were mostly black, except for that worn by Dr Wollheim, which was a brightly‐coloured pinkish silk one—I think his doctorate was in Divinity. An academic atmosphere filled the air as we waited for the guests to take the places reserved for them. Then, from a distance we could hear ‘Kwete .. Kwete … Kwete’. The sound became louder and louder, s that we were all attracted to the direction from which it came. Someone cried out ‘Ah! Imbongi ye sizwe! (Salute the poet of the nation!) The atmosphere was electric when the poet S.E.K. Mqhayi appeared, walking slowly towards the stand. He wore a beautiful animal skin, thrown carelessly over one shoulder, while the other one was free. As he uttered golden words in praise of education and of the school, the people silently echoed his last words in appreciation. I remember very well, to this day, one of the things he said, and which I heard then for the first time: ‘Uyavuya yena umtu onenyeke ngokuba xa ehleka uhleka nge nyama’ (Happy is the person who has a hare‐lip because when he laughs, he laughs with meat). When the next term started, we had three more white female teachers. I think that this was a time I enjoyed very much in my life. I certainly worked very hard, especially in Xhosa, because it was a subject which I had to pass to achieve my certificate. But the subjects I liked most were Latin (for which I used to get passing marks of 9)%), followed by English and Biology. We were taken on visits to museums, aquariums and many other places connected with our lessons. Because our school was not well‐equipped, Dr. Wollheim, a 279
devoted man who wanted good results from the school, got permission from the neighbouring Selborne High School to do some lessons there. This was a boys school for white children, and we had to wait until after they had finished their lessons before we could go there for our lessons in Biology, Physiology and Hygiene. We also had sports matches, both home and away, with other black schools, but never with the whites. Then, early in 1941, which was my last year in school, I had to visit the Frere Hospital because I was suffering from a severe toothache. It was the first time I had had a toothache. In general, our teeth were good while we were at primary school; there were no children with either tooth decay or fillings. We scrubbed our teeth with white ash which we carefully scooped with a spoon from a fire that had been made with dry cattle dung called lisu (plural) or sesu (singular). There at the hospital I was received by two smartly‐dressed young nurses who were very kind to me. I also watched them very closely when they were attending to other patients. I was really charmed by their kindness, smartness and cleanliness. Thus it was that, by the time I left the hospital, I was debating fiercely with myself about why I should not take up nursing. My mother had, on several occasions when I was still at primary school, suggested that she would be happy if I took up nursing, but I had rejected the idea. The reports which were circulating in the community in those days were that nurses were cruel to their patients, that they bet them up when they refused to take their medicines. But my second reluctance to take up nursing was that I was too horrified to look at open wounds and extensive burns; it was just unthinkable that I should be able to handle such things—the image of the little boy I had seen at my grandmother’s place, which I mentioned earlier, was still vivid in my mind. 280
I was helped in my decision by the knowledge that a few other pupils who were, like myself, in Form III, had already declared their intention to take up nursing. I therefore wrote at once to my mother to tell her that I had changed my mind about taking up teaching, and that I had now decided to take up nursing. My mother took quite a long time before answering my letter. When her reply came, she made it clear that she, as well as my father, were delighted and that he had already contacted the Anglican priest, Father Wordsworth, to seek his advice. The priest, in his turn, suggested that I go to the Holy Cross Hospital, in East Pondoland, where he had missionary friends. Later, they sent me the full address of the hospital, in order that I should start making application. My application was successful, and by the time I left East London in December 1941, I already knew the date on which I was to start at Holy Cross. That was July 1942. I was very happy to have a break of six months before I had to start studying again. Although all students were happy at Welsh High School, towards the end of our time there was much gloom and uncertainty because of the Second World War which had started. Every day, when the siren sounded from the city centre, everybody would stand still for a prayer for five minutes. During the night, the street lights were off, and we had difficulty going to our night studies. East London being a seaport, it seemed as if the Germans were about to land there at any time Then, when I went home for good, the trains were really packed with soldiers, black as well as white. At every station the train passed there were men in uniform. It was a great difference from the time I first traveled to East London. But, in general, we pupils did not talk much about the war. I think the reason was that it was more important for us to get our education in order to improve ourselves. In January 1942 the results of my Form III examination came, and I had passed. It was a great relief to me, because I was so worried about my Xhosa. My parents as well as the rest of the family 281
(including my grandmother) were very happy and proud that I had been successful in getting ‘boys education’ as they called it. The family were even more pleased when my father came back from one of the quarterly meetings and reported that Father Wordsworth had told him that I would be getting a higher training in nursing, one that would enable me to work anywhere in the world. During those days in South Africa, several black nurses were often given only a Hospital Certificate, and not allowed to take State Registration, because their standard of education at entry was considered to be very low. As I had six months in which I could do nothing, I paid a visit to my mother’s mother, which whom I stayed for two months. She, as well as the rest of the family were delighted; it had been three years since I had last visited their place. When I told her that I was going to take up nursing, my grandmother’s advice to me was that I should not lose my temper with people who were ill. As I went backwards and forwards in the next few days, nostalgia for my youth came back. I remembered the days when we used to run in the meadows, chasing butterflies and grasshoppers; I recalled how we used to ride on goats and how I used to practice balancing a clay carrier full of water from the well on my head. Coming from a big city, I was now comparing traditional life with western civilization. For instance, I saw a balloon for the first time in East London. When we were young, boys and girls in our village used to make balloons by washing out the bladder of any beast that had been slaughtered, inflate it, and tie the top with strong grass—
the same grass that would also be used for making skipping ropes We had copied this from children of two villages near ours; we had called those children maqaba (illiterates), and they had responded by calling us makarammele, which I think was a corruption of makeresete (Christians). They also referred to us as mathisa, meaning that we had not gone to initiation ceremonies. This remark was intended to hurt us, but as Christians we could not go along with that custom. These 282
people, who neither went to church, nor used coffins for burial, also did not send their children to school. But we liked them: they were a peaceful people, who taught us a great many of the traditions of the past, as well as their language, which had remained pure and uninfluenced by contact with others. Their men took more than two wives, and girls, like boys, were sent to initiation schools, at the end of which period a big feast would be held, where the girls would parade, well‐groomed, with their breasts exposed and their bodies covered in red ochre and wearing v‐shaped skin sebeto (skirts) very short in front to expose their thighs. As they marched slowly in a line, being seen for the first time in three months, young men would stumble over each other in their rush to plant feathers on the heads of those they wanted to marry, while the women would ululate as the older men beat the drums for the girls to march in step. Young men who could afford to do so, would festoon the girls they wanted to marry with beads, with colourful chiffons or flowers. On that day the girl would not even know who had planted the feather on her, because she would have to look down all the time; it was the older men and women who kept a close watch on the movements of the young men. These people used to have large flocks of sheep, goats and cattle, but now, three years after, I found their flocks to be terribly diminished. The landscape, too, had changed; the grass and shrubs were all gone. But what I noticed were the great changes with the people. Many of the boys and girls with whom I had gone to school were no longer in the village; some had married, but most were reported to have gone to the cities—mostly Durban and Johannesburg—to seek work. I also noticed that only about six of us from our village and the neighbouring ones had managed to get to colleges; there were only two girls (their father was a teacher) who had taken Junior Certificate: the majority left school after completing Standard III. 283
As I painfully debated these matters with myself, I even thought how nice it might have been had Mr. Majombozi come to Maatiele. I recall how, before I had left to go to Holy Cross, my grandmother called me one day and showed me a chicken which, she said, would be part of my provisions on my way to Pondoland, and had gone on to talk about the olden days when her father had had so many sheep and cattle that they ate meat every day; she blamed the increasing poverty of the people on the coming of the whites. That was the time I said to myself that, for an African child to get education, was like a camel passing through a needle’s hole. I left towards the end of the second month of my stay with my grandmother; by now she was sleeping with her great‐grandchildren. She died in 1954, having seen my two children. In those days, only one train per day came to Matatiele; it arrived at about ten o’clock and left at four o’clock in the afternoon. So, from home I took the bus which transported migrant workers between Mtatiele and Lesotho. For the first time I traveled Second Class, which meant that I could reserve a seat. But I still had to carry all my provisions, since there were no services on the trains for Africans; these were reserved exclusively for whites. From Kokstad I took a small railway bus to a small town called Flagstaff, which is in Pondoland. From there it was easy to get the transport going to Holy Cross because it was well marked, and had a regular route: after collecting the hospital post in the town, it would go to the railway bus stop to collect any passengers for the hospital. Holy Cross itself was a conglomeration of all types of building set in an area of some thirty to thirty‐five acres. The most conspicuous building was the church, with its spire that could be seen from a great distance. Then there was the hospital itself, together with the usual quarters for doctors, nurses, and domestic staff. In addition there was a post office, a primary school, and a boarding school for boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen. This boarding school 284
was renowned for its discipline. The pupils were Pondo children whom the mission had offered to educate in order to equip them to help their people in the future. For recreation for the residents there were two tennis courts, as well as a hall for concerts and dances. The atmosphere at Holy Cross was one of friendship and benevolence; people got to know each other very well because of the daily rubbing of shoulders at work, in church, at places of recreation. We also got to know people from the neighbouring villages, as many of us, especially the young nurses, used to pay regular home visits for chats when we were off duty. Perhaps staying at an isolated place, like a mission, for four years, made many of us homesick, but these village visits were helpful in that we learnt the Pondo dialect from its roots; that helped us to translate for doctors from abroad, several of whom did their housemanship at Holy Cross. There were no trained African doctors then, only African ‘Medical Aids’. It was only in the final year of my training that the first African doctors to qualify at the University of the Witwatersrand came to do their housemanship at Holy Cross. Although my enthusiasm to take up nursing was influenced by my visit to the Frere Hospital in East London, when I actually started, I found it a great challenge. For the first three months we all had to go through what was called PTS; this was a probationary period, during which all new nurses worked in the pantry. There we prepared special diets based on the request forms sent by the ward sisters according to what each patient was supposed to eat. AT lunch times we were each allocated different wards in which to serve the meals and to feed those patients who could not help themselves. After that we had to take round bedpans and generally clean up the wards as we went along. In the afternoons we were trained in how to give bedbaths, to take temperatures, and in the art of bedmaking. All these things had to be done within an allocated time; it was stressed 285
that conscientiousness, speed, and thoroughness were essential requirements for each pupil nurse. Then, after the three months, the Matron called each probationary nurse for a friendly chat, during which she wanted to know if we were all prepared to continue with our course after what we had seen and done. She said that it might so happen that some of us might have discovered that nursing was not the right course for us. She would give us three days to think it over, after which each one of s could tell her, individually, of our decision. From that time, after the end of our probationary period, each one of us accepted the challenge of nursing as a career. The theoretical level, as well as the responsibilities of the practical work, increased with each passing year. What I appreciated most was the attachment to the patients and the internal joy which followed when patients improved and got well. I also found that the Latin I had studied at Junior Certificate was very helpful in nursing as so many medical words originated from it. Although there was hard work and studying to do at Holy Cross, I really enjoyed my stay there. The environment was superb: not only was there no pollution and noise like in East London, but what was even more gratifying was that members of the staff, from the Rev. Dr. Drewe—the Superintendent, who had been trained at St. Thomas’s in London, the Matron Miss Tracey and the Sisters, who were all from Britain, were sympathetic to all the nurses, and devoted to their work of teaching us and seeing to our welfare and that of the patients. Once a week Dr. Drewe had organized visits, by medical teams from the hospital, to the remote areas around us to attend to those people who could not reach the hospital. I really appreciated his work and always thought that if successive white governments in South Africa had created such a machinery in all parts of the rural areas, many African lives could have been saved. In Matatiele the people had to 286
depend on traditional medicine; although there were two white doctors in private practice, nobody could possibly afford them because they were too poor. Although our stipend was only thirteen shillings a month for the first year, and £1 in the second, I always saved, and so was able to find the fare for the return journey for my holidays. I felt that my parents had done enough for me and my elder sister not to ask them for the fare; besides, they were still faced with the education of my younger brothers and sisters. Going home to see my family was wonderful, but at the same time it was an agonizing and depressing time for me when I looked at the state of health of the people. I would find that whole families had been wiped out by TB, by child mortality from pneumonia, from whooping cough, measles and generally from malnutrition, which had reached alarming proportions. The more I learnt and knew about these diseases and how easily these could have been prevented, the more I realized the suffering of my people. It was at Holy Cross that I began to understand more about the Second World War. There was an Englishman, Mr. Houghton, who had fought during the First World War who used to come to the Nurses Home with maps twice or thrice a week to explain the war. As everybody was aware that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands,, of Africans were being recruited, we believed that things might change for the better for our people after the war. But others amongst us recalled the sinking of the Mendi, during the First World War, in which hundreds of African soldiers on their way to Europe had perished. Yet there had been no change after that. Anyway, we lived in hopes. In 1944, a friend of the family who worked in Kokstad had subscribed to weekly copies of The Bantu World for me as a Christmas present. It was in this paper that I first read about the African National Congress, whose president, at that time, was Dr. Xuma. 287
Many nurses read the paper because it reported mainly on African affairs; it was the first newspaper I ever read. It was the pictures in this paper that reminded me of the men that I had first seen in East London at the Peacock Hall. Some nurses from Natal said that they knew of a man called Champion who was also a leader of the ANC. However, the talk would end there as nobody really understood much about the subject. We left for Durban early in 1946 to sit our final examination at the King Edward VII hospital. It was my first visit to that city. We were lodged at the McCord Zulu Hospital, which was also a missionary hospital, where the Superintendent, Dr. Taylor, was also a friend of Dr Drewe. What struck us in Durban was the huge Indian population. The results of the examination came towards the middle of the year. I was in charge of the male medical wad when Rev. Norton, who was in charge of the church, walked in and embraced me, after which he broke the news that I had passed: I just stood there motionless; it was only after he had gone that the joy for my parents flashed through my mind. I was to stay on at Holy Cross for a further three months to complete my contract. In the meantime, having abandoned the idea of taking midwifery immediately, I made an application to work at the Pretoria General Hospital. My brother was doing his final year at the primary school, and I thought that it was time for me to help my parents after their hard struggle. I made up my mind to work for at least five years before I could think of getting married. At eight o’clock on the eve of my departure, like all other nurses who were leaving, I went to see the Matron for the presentation of my Hospital Certificate and to bid farewell to her. After I had taken my seat facing her, she handed me my Certificate, which was written in red letters. (I received my State Registration later, when I was working in Pretoria.) She then explained that after all my reports 288
since my probationary period had been scrutinized, they had decided that I merited a First Class pass. I heaved with astonishment. She went on to say that the doctors, sisters and herself (she was an anesthetist) had all thought that I was one of the best theatre nurses they had ever had. Amazing! I just could not believe my ears. Then, finally, she unwrapped a paper and took out a brand new navy blue and red nurses’ cape and gave it to me. She went on to say that she usually presented either a pair of scissors, or a torch, but she was giving me the cape as a mark of distinction so that I could wear it during my work; she then wished me all the success in my career. As I left the office I still could not believe it. During my training I had tried hard to do what I was capable of doing, but I had never expected so many words of praise from the Matron. Miss Tracey was well‐known for her strictness all round; we used to shiver when she came to take rounds—she was such a perfectionist that she was nicknamed ‘Colani’ (Pick Up!) because, as she went round the hospital, she would ask staff to pick up even the smallest piece of paper or rubbish she saw. Actually, she got to know her nickname later on, because she learnt to speak Xhosa; she would say, ‘I know Colani is my name, but I want the hospital so clean that I can eat in it’. I spent a month at home before going to Pretoria, where there were already a few nurses from Holy Cross. I was going to the Transvaal for the first time but I was somewhat apprehensive because of the stories, which were commonplace, that we heard about the Boers. 289
Chapter 21
King Kong, Brave As A Lion
by
290
Sylvester Stein
King Kong—mountain gorilla,, King Kong—lord of the ring, King Kong—heavyweight killer, That’s me, I’m him. King Kong. The greatest guy! The greatest guy! King Kong! King Kong! No other guy so wide and high, King Kong! King Kong! Now events in Todd’s life were to take a different and better twist … so it looked. As Nemesis riffled through his little diary f things to come he’d tipped Todd a cheery wink, pointing to where he was ordering up a happier future for him than razor‐blading. Ah, the old deceiver! There was, in particular, one wonderful event in the air that seemed bound to guide Todd, and with him all our party, up a far jollier road. It would surely influence the future in our favour and numb our personal pain at the loss of our colleagues as well as soothe our hurt at the searing public tragedy of Sharpeville in 1960. It would take us forward in a very gay and positive way, this event, for it would make its entry to the accompaniment of African gusto and irrepressibility—and it was, in fact, immediately foreshadowed by the arrival in Britain of Todd himself, that most jovial, glittering and irrepressible of Africans, released at last from his grubby career in doorstep sales. He had decided to take the refugee route, encouraged by old Nemesis, and was bringing with him a mighty band of his comrades to put song and fun into the chilly hearts of us strays and exiles. 291
This happening was something real and something splendid. It was the King Kong show arriving in London in 1961, and with it the whole team, its 99 strong cast and orchestra straight from Soweto. This was not “King Kong” the story of the gorilla and Fay Wray; this was the township jazz musical that Todd had composed, with Harry Bloom and Pat Williams as librettists. In Johannesburg its enormous success had finally knocked into all South Africa’s heads the fact that inside their own country, on both sides of the colour bar, wondrous theatrical and musical genius existed. Now after a houses‐full tour of all Southern Africa it was transferring to the West End, looking to go on to Broadway later. A triumphal way out of the apartheid prison for Todd. King Kong, story of a heavyweight township boxer, was nothing less than Drum set up on stage. Music, dance, sort, politics, crime, shebeens, sex, township life … the complete Drum cocktail. What’s more not only Todd but many other ex‐Drum men were in the company, even Gwigwi Mwerbi, the circulation manager finding a slot as saxophonist in the orchestra. All were taking the chance of freedom and cherishing hopes of fortune and lifelong fame. So now, with the ANC also having set up a presence in London, almost the whole of our former wonderful circle was there. It was the high point of the diaspora. Invitations to meet the rich and famous rained down on our heads, and the rich and famous in their turn fished for invitations from us. There was an open part one night at my house, a ‘function’ you’d call it, that turned out too popular for its own good. Organised by the anti‐apartheid people, under the grand patronage of Lord Lugard, Gwen Frangcon‐Davies, the actress, Lady Caroline Wedgwood‐Benn and a pair or so of Cabinet ministers, it drew an unexpectedly huge mob of curious English socialites, as well as unrestrained numbers of our exiles who’d worked themselves up into a democratic fervour at 292
the chance to shake the hands of the aristocracy they usually found so beneath contempt. Early on our three great living rooms were stuffed beyond capacity, with not a square inch of space for the drawing of breath let alone for dancing—and a queue of clamourous ticket‐holders still arriving, to be turned back down the garden path again in another queue that bulged out through the iron gates and along the pavement towards the Underground at Camden Town. An enterprise smothered by its own success. Aside from that flop, however, King Kong’s fame and promise were bringing cheer, bathing us all in the spotlight and brightening our lives. Now that the show had opened in Shaftesbury Avenue, thought the optimists in the company, money and fame for each performer was surely guaranteed for ever. Let us celebrate immediately—and forever! Todd himself threw a party of the township kind, high‐voltage and non‐stop. The Matshikiza family was by now living in a basement flat up the road from me beside the green slopes of Primrose Hill, where two or three other old friends had already come to roost, each new family snuggling in beside the one who’d turned up just ahead of them so you soon had a nice little community squashed up together and continuing to grow around the nucleus of the first who’d been sent out to take shelter, as in the game of Sardines. It chanced in that period that not one but two different sets of people had settled in the road. There were these South Africans of ours, and there was a second clique made up of Britain’s bright new satire generation of entertainers and writers. They too had piled up very close on top of each other, another clump of sociable barnacles. 293
The two sets mixed happily together, soon making cross‐colony connections. Eleanor Bron moved into a flat in my house; next door to us on the one side was Jonathan Miller, and semi‐detached to us on the other was Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes on the middle floors of a tall, elegant Georgian residence with a rather superior rocking horse in the front window (more that 30 years later it’s still there, rocking away with that same supercilious look on its face, though of course Ted and Sylvia aren’t); around the corner lived Bill Oddie; regular visitors were John Fortune, John Bird, Marty Feldman, the pop‐eyed comic, Desmond Morris the Naked Ape man, cartoonist Mel Calman, the Dankworths, themselves ex officio members of that same jazzy scene, and Dudley Moore, then known only as Dankworth’s pianist and not yet sanctified by Hollywood. This crowd of neighbours was invited to our festivities, hat was the South African way. There was a quiet start to the Matshikiza party, a good omen surely, for how many quiet beginnings didn’t we all remember that ended in wild and wonderful dancing and singing? On arrival I was offered a first drink by Todd, whom I found in ruminating mood, working up his impressions of that great city. Being sensitive to race matters, he had already smoked out aspects of apartheid that had followed us here. Laughing expansively, to show it didn’t matter, he told me how he’d gone to a barber had said to him coldly, refusing to in his clean, white sheet around this black man’s neck, ‘we don’t handle your sort of hair.’ Todd sniggered bitingly: “He’s afraid! Still I’m sir to him, anyway mind you, my dear sir, yes man, yes sir, I’m known as sir, one of the untouchables or not!’ He guided a pint of beer past his moustache. ‘And, hey, Sylvestar, what do you think of this, it’s ghettos again here too, we’re back living in a ghetto of our own again, all us blacks fenced in together.’ 294
‘It’s only sardines,’ I grunted. I had to admit to myself, though, that it truly was a ghetto, building up apace in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre as more and more of our colleagues tumbled into London. But I played it down, now the patriotic Londoner. ‘Just only the sardines game,’ I said again. ‘Huh?’ came from Todd, eyebrows rising up slowly, though his eyes twinkled beneath. He shortly got my point, however, while maintaining his own, even extending the metaphor further. He saw the effect as part of the bigger waves of blacks and other immigrants from over the world moving into north London, each ethnic group segregated into its own territory. ‘First impressions from a traveler making notes of local customs,’ Todd said to me, laughing in his hearty way, head flung back, with another drink preparing to find its way through the moustache, that bristly moustache that seemed so much a part of his laugh as well as his drinking. ‘Look at the map of London here, Sylvestapol my boy, these English natives have got it all worked out very nice and apt to keep the interlopers off; there’s all these separate little boxes, with tell‐tale names pinned on each of them; they’ve packed the Caribbeans away together over in British West Hampstead as you might say, then there’s the Jews up in Golders Greenstein, yes very nice and pat, specially designed for them, it could be Golders Greenberg either and finally behold … there’s Belsize Parkistan and there’s Muslim Hill!’ Now there arrived the soignée Pat Williams, who’d written the lyrics for King Kong, introducing her friend Desmond Morris to Todd. Morris, a large solid man, stood next to Todd, towering above him, while they looked out of the window across the enclosed yard at the ‘view’, an unlovely wall of faded russet‐coloured old brick, only a few feet away and bulging inwards a bit, trying to come still closer. ‘It makes me uneasy,’ Todd observed of this rather claustrophobic London phenomenon, ‘so near, it stops the air coming in.’ 295
‘Certainly a bijou little place you have here,’ agreed Desmond giving it the kindliest construction. ‘Bijou!’ Todd liked that. ‘And, hey, there’s a bijou little at strolling on it above us.’ The cat now stopped and crouched there, camouflaged against the rusty background of the wall, a marmalade cat with just two legs dangling down, each foot and the tail showing white at the tips. ‘At a distance you read it as a patch of small white roses dotted across a reddish creeper,’ Todd commented. Desmond was charmed by the lyrical statement. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, pulling a lock of lank black hair up across his brow and screwing up his eyes to see if he could call up that vision for himself. ‘To be perfectly frank with you though,’—in some moods Todd was certainly frank, even confrontational—‘what we really need here, man, is not a cat but a dog. It would remind us of home, as we weren’t allowed to keep one out there. A nice bijou little doggie.’ ‘You’d be much better advised,’ Desmond laid down in a booming lecture‐room tone, ‘to have a very large, easygoing dog, such as a Labrador; if you’re going to keep your family pet in a very limited space, don’t get a small, snappy dog like a corgi.’ ‘Done!’ .. Todd relied, ‘and we’ll have just one very large bijou tree in the middle of the yard for its convenience.’ ‘Convenience!’ smiled Desmond, seeing here a joke Todd hadn’t intended. Todd moved away now to greet others, the place was filling fast. What Todd didn’t know was that Desmond Morris at that time was curator of mammals at London Zoo just down the road, and that he had just learnt from Desmond one of life’s great truths,‐‐that a big dog is more restful than a small one. 296
One of Todd’s kids came up, to tug at his father’s coat, eyes shining, ‘I just seen Paul Robeson,’ he whispered admiringly. ‘Everybody’s here.’ Everybody only not the Pope,’ said Todd. He turned to me with a wink, ‘it was Robertson, the TV man.’ ‘And only not the Queen either,’ added the kid, one of his expectations dashed. ‘Just keep a watch out for her,’ Todd said, packing him off. Then turning to me he said, ‘This drinking gives me a thirst, what about another?’ Before we could look round his wife Esme was there, pouring us each a beefy one; a good‐looking and very self‐possessed person she had been circulating through the party with a vast jorum of wine, donated by the Matshikiza’s landlord, another of our South African ‘sardine’ neighbours, Ivan Stoller, an idle young millionaire and as it happened owner of the dog Scottie. The wine, cheap and cheerful, had a speedy affect in turning up the volume of the general chatter. Suddenly, a shrill cry. From the corner where my wife Jenny was, arose something of a strident scene. Sylvia Plath, with whom she’d lately struck up a close friendship and who’d been talking to her and Bloke, had jumped up with a small scream in the middle of their conversation and dashed across the room and straight out between the crowd through the front door, to set off other little frightened shrieks from a woman she’d brushed past at speed. ‘Sylvia—my God!’ yelped Bloke too, his eyes popping out, ‘what’s she got the huff for, what have I said, what have I done? I never pinched her bottom or nothing nice like that.’ Jenny ticked him off. ‘Don’t always think it’s on your account.’ 297
‘What’s it then?’ ‘She’s pregnant.’ ‘Pregnant! How can you tell?’ Bloke was even more pop‐eyed. ‘And did she just suddenly find out Who’s it by, anyway, so quick? Not me!’ ‘Bloke, there you go again, don’t always think it’s you.’ She pinched his ear in a teasing way: ‘Get it? Get it Bloke?’ It appeared to have been another of Jenny’s great inspired guesses. ‘I simply said to her two of our kids couldn’t come to the party tonight because they were kept home with German measles. She looked as if she’d been shot, jumped up suddenly and rushed off without a word.’ ‘Well, whyfore? What’s she got against Germans’ measles?’ asked Bloke, astonished. And how could that make her pregnant?’ ‘Because when you’re pregnant—so you see she knew she was – it can harm your unborn baby to catch it.’ Jenny spoke severely to him, as if he should have known better: So there you are, two plus two, it’s simple. She’s being silly though, how could she catch it from me when the kids’re at home? H’m, so she’s pregnant is she!’ Bloke rather muddled about all this, apologized for his stupid questions and played for a laugh, ‘Hey, I better clear off as well, otherwise I’ll get you girls pregnant too.’ We gratified him with a good round of laughter. By this time a crowd had come over to hear from Bloke and Jenny what it all was about. The Matshikiza kid, circulating through the party at his own lower 298
level, had also quickly darted over between the knees of the adults to where the action was. To distract him, so that he wouldn’t over‐excite himself, Ivan Stoller, who’d appointed himself uncle to the family, put a friendly arm around him and said: ‘Nice pink pyjamas you got there, sunshine!’ This had the effect of recalling Todd to his duties. ‘Hey, you … you should be in bed!’ ‘I can’t sleep.’ He was quite right, it had got very noisy. The flat was packed and everyone had something to say, or rather to ell. Things were still in a reasonably genteel state though, but now a second small sensation came up—a good thing really, a successful party is very much elevated in mood by such fruity and emotional real‐life episodes, items worthy of gossip hatching out before one’s eyes being of especial benefit. This next business that raised the tempo was a noisy falling out between two of us, normally warm friends. Thus … On a battered green and red‐striped sofa near the window there was sitting a party within a party, all squashed together across each others’ laps, giving the sofa the look of an overcrowded life‐raft in stormy seas. They were discussing contentious though highly intellectual matters. There was Arthur Maimane, Gwigwi, Dam‐Dam, Robert Resha, the ANC man, Barney Desai, the Africanist, and Rose his wife, James Phillips, the vocalist who always led the singing of Nkosi Sikelel’I Afrika, Malcolm and Jean, Monty Berman, our latest refugee friend—and now Bloke joining them, squeezing down beside Jean and manoeuvring her up and over so that she sat on his knee. So then, he was still on the long chase to get closer and closer to her, was he—one day, his attitude seemed to show, who knows, who knows …? 299
Arthur, one of those whom alcohol might befuddle but never destroy, consistent drinker though he was, was knocking it back busily and had put to these castaway mariners the proposition that Sol Plaatje, who in 1912 had been one of the founders of the ANC as well as the author of a number of books of high literary value, both fiction and polemic, could confidently be described as South Africa’s greatest African writer. Arthur was maybe out to start an argument, though for a moment it didn’t catch fire. ‘Yes, well, who else?’ concurred most of the voices on the sofa. ‘Plaatje!’ Resha hailed him, lifting a glass. ‘Yes,’ said I, supporting the motion, ‘agreed, agreed … but you know what’—as a daring thought came to me—‘maybe you should group equally with him our own great Zeke.’ Zeke, author of a series of fine and true stories of African life, his autobiography recently published and more books in the pipeline, wasn’t to be embarrassed by this, he was abroad. It did the trick, though: my intervention brought trouble. It caused Bloke, poking his head out from behind Jean to frown severely. ‘No, no, no, you can’t say that. Ridiculous—Zeke!’ ‘Oh, yes, it’s certainly a bit ridiculous of you, Sylvervest,’ Todd backed him. ‘Our nice old Zeke, surely not, come, come, come.’ ‘No‐no, wag – ‘n bietjie (wait a little), don’t object too quick. Look here, ‘I argued,’ just judge the literary quality of the man. And though Zeke is still only at the start of his career, he already matches Plaatje: he has depth, humour, humanity, a wonderful line, a style of his own, and, most important of all, he has a theme. And he’s no lightweight.’ That caused Bloke to wrench himself right out from under his pretty burden, brush her off him virtually—‘excuse me honey, excuse me’—
to stand up and expostulate very loudly. He actually exploded. This normally smiling, accommodating man let a wave of sheer, sneering 300
laugher rip out of him—it was laughter not meant to be funny but derisive … cutting. It was a great fortissimo outburst; I half expected the children to pop back out from the bedroom again. On Jean’s face there appeared a sardonic and quizzical look. What could have turned him so emotional and harsh, I asked, as Bloke went on making a fuss about it? I realized what it was: the great green god of envy hovering in the background. Behind the sour laughter, you could imagine Bloke asking the world, ‘Am I not weighty too? Haven’t I too a big theme?’ It made him bristle, this praise for Zeke. The worst of it, I surmised, is that he must have felt that it was part true—that’s what would have rankled the most. It’s not to say that Bloke was not also a writer of quality, but he never achieved the poetry and philosophy and depth of feeling of those other two, Plaatje and Mphahlele. And Todd too, backing him up here as another overlooked writer, had wit and charm, but could not achieve the depth, the gravitas. Bloke was sorely betrayed by this bitterness that showed under his usually engaging and congenial surface expression. And while he revealed personal bitterness, interestingly enough Plaatje had displayed none—was there ever more gentle and forgiving a man, although he’d had to labour under even greater obloquy in his life than had the Africans of post‐Second World War? I said nothing more, though, just packing away in my head the thought that what one had seen here was plain jealousy. ‘How could you class Zeke so high and not me’ was what must have been passing through Bloke’s mind. It brings particular heartache to feel one is being overshadowed by a peer and contemporary. Not to say that I didn’t suffer a little soreness myself, I felt rather sadly that I would have liked to be classed as an African too, and thus eligible for the competition, with three or four novels to my credit, not to mention a textbook on running! 301
I switched to another subject, sitting down next to Dam‐Dam—
Nathan Dambuza Mdledle the singer who played King Kong in the show, that human gorilla—to talk to him about the big gumboot dance he did on stage and its origins at the Durban docks, where the whaling station workers would meet in the vast flensing shed and despite the turgid smell of whale blood and blubber, dance in wonderful unison on the greasy floor, doing their gumboot adaptation of the traditional barefoot Zulu war‐dance. It produced a still greater slapping, stamping noise than did the original, it was very stirring and strangely flamenco in feeling, from Spain rather than Africa. Or perhaps where Spain first got it from was Africa? In the years since that contentious conversation, I’ve often returned to the proposition, who’s the greater and in fact the greatest African writer from South Africa, Plaatje or Mphahlele? Amazingly enough, to make it a fairer contest, it is not only Mphahlele whose publishing output has had a chance to grow and burgeon since that night, but Plaatje’s too, in spite of his death having taken place long before, in 1931. For his early novel Mhudi, which had been issued in a private edition only originally, was given general publication in later years; his Native Life in South Africa became ever more widely known; and miraculously, his beautiful diaries of the 1899 Siege of Mafeking, where he had served as an interpreter, were brought to light for the first time, unearthed from an old family hut as long as 80 years after they were written and 50 years after his death, to be published finally amid great acclaim. What intrigued me was the style and tone of the text of that amazing diary, which, save for the fact that it was hidden from view all this time, might well have been the model for the characteristic sound and style of the Drum writers. Presumably there is something particular and intrinsic in the way that African writers express themselves in English. 302
Esme, now anxious about the drink running out, came over to ask Todd what she should do. ‘We need more, where’s the nearest shebeen?’ ‘Shebeen, shebeen!’ Todd cried, facing this drought crisis, ‘where do they keep their shebeens, these natives?’ ‘Simply send to the off‐license,’ suggested one of the natives, the well‐informed and imperturbable Desmond Morris. ‘So late at night!’ ‘They stay open precisely as long as the pubs.’ Amazed at the liberality of the law, Esme, shaking her head in disapproval of such lax public morality, went out with a large basket, and myself as company. Our return did the life of the party a great deal of good. The walls of the small flat no longer pressed in on us, but seemed to expand as Esme’s reserves of liquor carried out their happy work bolstering our confidence, our spirits and our wit. Mind, there was still some disappointment in certain corners because of obstacles in getting at the drink. The crush meant that glasses had to be passed along overhead, and did not always arrive, being appropriated on the way—which had the curious effect of diminishing the level of intoxication and noise in proportion to the distance from the kitchen. This led to a polite pushing and jockeying for positions nearer the kitchen and to some vociferous repeat orders from the outfield. From the rocky sofa near the window a low chorus of song now drifted across, turning before long into a general sing‐song. How could we have spent so long neglecting our customary party joys! The hearty singing drove up the voice level needed for normal 303
speech. Inyani! (in truth)‐it cold have been Sophiatown. Home sweet home reborn! Todd was now playing his piano, hammering out numbers from King Kong. But there were whispers behind his back when he started on the tune of It’s a Wedding. ‘A bit tumpty,’ groused an English musician with a pasty face, a noisy and obstreperous fellow. We did have to admit though that this was partially true. There had certainly been lukewarm comments about the production from several London critics and we had to agree that the show hadn’t quite come off the way it had in Africa Though a major event for us, it wasn’t yet sure of being a long‐run hit among the British. It was a precarious moment for it. ‘It lost some of its raw vitality on the way in,’ granted Ivan Stoller, ‘it got cleaned up a bit for the West End, what a mistake, what a mistake.’ ‘Eheh, raw vitality,’ Dambuza acknowledged the shortcoming a bit glumly.. ‘No, it lost Miriam Makeba, she was the star of the show,’ corrected Jenny sharply, not sparing sensibilities. She spoke the truth, the management hadn’t been able to keep Miriam in the star part she played in Johannesburg, they couldn’t settle terms with her. Miriam! You can still hear that golden voice of Miriam’s on the old LP, it stands witness to the difference between the South African cast and the one that had been brought over, for Miriam was much more than merely an actress singing. ‘Miriam! Give me a cherry every time!’ a raucous admirer of hers now sang out, a quote from the show. 304
A momentary dampener was put on things. To beat it off, Esme kept circulating faster than ever with her life‐preserving liquids. Todd in particular was drinking more and more and now did one of his popular turns, very exuberantly, standing up before us, a small proud man, and rattling through in his best elocutionary manner the speaking of the Xhosa phrase … I‐qaqa liqikaqikeka e quaqwni, Laqhau’k uqhoqhoqo lahothaq‐hothek’ umnqunho’ In translation this had something to do with a skunk tumbling over on its side and down green slopes and snapping its spine. No matter, there was a great deal of phonetic richness about it, a virtuoso display of Xhosa clicks, clacks, sploshes and pops, which went down famously with the company. There were more cheers and laughs and downings of drink and frolicsome attempts by the locals at these click sounds until the house supplies again looked in threat. ‘Now it’s really after pubtime, we really need a shebeen,’ Esme appealed. ‘Don’t panic,’ said a knowing fellow, one of the early arrivals from abroad, ‘now we simply go to the back door of the pub instead of the front. I know the guv’nor.’ ‘So they have got shebeens!’ exclaimed Esme. ‘And not a madame but a guv’nor.’ Off we trotted again. Bloke and Malcolm and Gwigwi, with Todd joining in over his shoulder from the piano, were continuing with a very high decibel conversation, nostalgic stuff about how brilliantly the musical had gone down on tour in Rhodesia, which then recalled to the musicians their experiences in bands in earlier days humping their instruments around on their way to a gig in the townships, only to be stopped 305
and searched by police believing they’d surely find stolen property tucked into those double‐bass and cello cases. ‘And the buggers expected a gun inside mine, instead of my tenor sax. For sure!’ called out Gwigwi, laughing loudly. ‘And when they saw only my nice silvery sax inside, “Where did you pinch that thing, kaffir, come quick, hand over, hand over”, they’d shout.’ A practiced raconteur with a rubbery visage, be believed that the louder one laughed and the wider one pulled one’s face the more likely it was others would see the point. At this stage in the party nobody was going to be too critical and all laughed as noisily as Gwigwi himself, while the piano, trying its hardest to get a word in above the row, kept banging away at the top of its fortissimos and a reckless clanking came from the kitchen from the washing up of more and yet more mugs and glasses. Generally one had here one of the finer pandemoniums. Then suddenly KO! KO! KO! A really frightening rap at the door. Rap‐a‐
rap‐rap! Our minds asked immediately: Is this the knocking of an unearthly Nemesis? Instantly the party hushed, all one could hear was the clink of Esme softly bustling about, guiltily concealing any evidence that there had been drink taken. KO! KO! KO! KO! again. Still for another moment or two nobody moved. Finally, Hello, Hello, Hello was shouted impatiently through from the other side of the doorway, anyone there? At this the brave host called himself to attention, marched over to the door, having to squeeze through the crowd of his guests to get there—eksuus mense, eksuus, eksuus!—flung it back and retreated a step … 306
Chapter 22 This Is America by Hugh Masekela I quickly cleared immigration at Idlewilde (now JFK) International Airport and, after a nervous walk through the terminal, approached a set of clear glass doors with the American morning waiting for me on the other side. Before I could ponder my next momentous step into a new world, the doors silently slid open on their own and the music of New York chaos breezed in on cool autumn air, an amazement. Miriam had called me before I left London to say that she would be away on tour with Harry Belafonte when I arrived, but that someone would meet me at the East Side Terminal in Manhattan. I was sitting on the bus riding through Jamaica, Queens, a twenty‐one‐year‐old from Witbank on my way to mythic Manhattan, when it finally hit me: I smiled to myself and whispered die dlladla my ma hoor my—this is America, I swear by my mother’s living soul. 307
When the bus pulled into the East Side Terminal, I calmly remained in my seat while everyone else disembarked. The bus driver, noticing that my suitcase was the only one left in the hold of the bus, came back into the vehicle and said to me, “Where are you going, buddy?” “I’m going to New York City, sir,” I said. This is New York City, my good friend,” the driver said. “You won’t find another one.” I stood up in disbelief and slowly stepped off the bus. Nothing around me looked like the sparkling New York City I had seen in the picture books or the movies. Everything was drab, dingy, and dark inside the terminal building. A smiling, light‐skinned African man in a navy blue suit with a maroon silk tie over a white shirt walked up to me. He was already holding my suitcase. “Com on, Hughie,” he said. “Let’s go home.” The man was Mburumba Kerina, a fellow exile and friend of Miriam, who had come to pick me up. I followed him to a cab. He told me he was SWAPO’s chief representative at the United Nations—SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Party, was petitioning the United Nations for the liberation of South West Africa (now Namibia). He was married to Jane Miller, an African‐American woman from California who was also very active in the Namibian liberation campaign, and together they had two kids, Kakuna, their four‐year‐
old daughter, and Mandume, a boy of two. Jane was expecting the couple’s third child. The Kerinas had become friends with Miriam after they attended one of her performances at the Village Vanguard. We rode up Third Avenue to 336 East 82nd Street, between First and Second Avenues, where Miriam was renting a basement apartment. Driving up Third Avenue, I responded to all of Mburumba’s stories about Namibia and the UN and his family with one question: “Is this really Manhattan?” I couldn’t believe this was the same New York City I had heard about and seen in movies. From the taxi it was a blur of people in the millions scampering to work, dirty streets, buses, 308
taxis, and shabby tenement buildings, open manholes, and newly dug ditches with hundreds of men in hard hats working on construction sites and street paving gangs. Signs all over read, DIG WE MUST FOR A BETTER NEW YORK. Police cars and fire engines with screaming sirens hurried to one crisis or another, battling to get through the congested traffic. Window washers hung suspended on scaffolding high up against buildings whose windows were sixty stories up in the air. Blaring car horns, stuttering air hammers, screeching tires, screaming voices; street sweepers; garbage collectors running to and from grubby, noisy garbage trucks, toting gigantic plastic bags and cans of trash; cyclists, joggers, and dog shit on the sidewalk—I could not believe the pandemonium. I quietly wondered if I had made the right decision by coming to America. Was this madness worth all the trouble I had gone through? Since they lived five blocks away, at 77th and Second Avenue, Miriam spent a lot of time with the Kerinas. Bongi, Miriam’s daughter, had become like their other child. When Mburumba and I finally arrived in Miriam’s pad, Bongi was there—more than excited to see me. She jumped into my arms—“Malme, Hugh!”—and launched into a fusillade of Zulu, already broken even though she had only been in America nine months. I had last seen Bongi with her grandmother at Dorkay House, where they had come to make final preparations for her travel plans to New York, so she could joint her mother. Bongi was eager to hear about her relatives back home, but mostly how her cousins Nhlanhla, Nongobozi, and Thupazile were doing. Unfortunately, I had last seen these kids in 1956 when Miriam and I started our torrid love affair. I could only say to Bongi that I was certain they were all very well, although I couldn’t explain why I had not seen them lately. Bongi was crestfallen I had not come bearing any tidings for her from Nhlanhla and her grandmother. When Miriam was away, Leslie Reed, an aspiring Puerto Rican actress, singer, and dancer, looked after Bongi with the help of Jean 309
Johnson, another aspiring singer from Harlem. The two women were always auditioning, but never seemed to get hired, so Miriam was helping them earn a few dollars by having them look after the apartment and Bongi while she was on the road. Jean was tall, dark, and quite attractive. Originally from the South, she was crazy about B.B. King and Ray Charles. Leslie had light skin, straight hair, and a dancer’s body, and spoke with the rat‐a‐tat relentlessness of a typewriter. Leslie came from a close‐knit family, and spoke to her mother on the phone several times a day in breakneck Nuyorican Spanish. I had been in the house a few hours when Miriam called from Las Vegas. She was excited that I had arrived safely, but would be away for another three weeks. She insisted that I make myself at home, and asked me to help Bongi with her homework because she was just beginning to learn English. With the new, inferior Bantu education for African children back home, Bongi had only been instructed in the ethnic languages before coming to America. My task was to decipher this new world Bongi was entering into Zulu first, and then teach her the English equivalent so that she could cope at her new school, the Downtown Community School in the East Village. That evening Leslie took me to the Jazz Gallery on East Eighth Street, where Dizzy Gillespie was sharing a bill with Thelonious Monk. When we walked in, the set was already on. Cheeks full extended, Dizzy was playing with Lalo Schifrin on piano, Rudy Stevens on drums, Mike White on bass, and Leo Wright on saxophone. He had just returned from South America, and you could hear the Brazilian influences in the music his bank played: “Desifinado,” “One Note Samba,” the theme from Black Orpheus, and other hot Brazilian compositions. Between songs he spotted me in the audience and smiled at me from the stage, nodding as if he’d been expecting me. Right after his set, he walked to our table and greeted me like a long‐
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lost brother. “Ooowee,” he said, “wait till Lorraine hears about this.” This jazz legend of bebop and I hugged—he told me how glad he was that I had finally gotten out of the apartheid hellhole and was relieved we didn’t have to write each other veiled and coded letters anymore. “Now we can talk about those bastards in South Africa without fear,” he said, bursting into his patented laugh and high‐
pitched “Oooweee.” Thelonious Monk walked and was heading toward the stage when Dizzy stood u and stopped him. “Hey, Thel, I want you to meet Hughie Masekela. He’s the South African trumpet player I told you about. He just got in this morning from London.” Monk was wearing his black sunglasses and customary black suit, black shirt, and mini‐
porkpie hat. He gave me a limp handshake and uttered an unintelligible, high‐pitched whine, “Nyiii,” then walked away. I never saw his eyes behind those dark sunglasses, just my own confused state looking back at myself. Dizzy hollered at him, “You was born dead, Thel. You hear me? Born daaeeiid.” He turned to Leslie and me, Don’t mind him. He’s a born actor. He’s got the biggest mouth in the world, oooweee.” I was in music heaven, meeting people I had idolized for years. I was dazzled but tongue‐
tied, especially after Monk’s weird introduction. “Let’s pop over to the Five Spot, across Third Avenue. Mingus and Max Roach are playing there. Max really wants to meet you, oooweee,” Dizzy said, breaking the awkwardness at our table. “Okay,” I managed. Dizzy was in high spirits, bubbling over. He reminded me of my uncle Kenneth back home, who even resembled Dizzy physically, down to the expensive tweed sport jacket, cashmere sweater, brown camel‐hair slacks, and English brogues. When we got to the Five Spot, the joint was packed to the rafters. The smoke‐filled room was jumping with Charlie Mingus looming wildly on stage, exhorting, cheering, and scolding his big band all at the same time while playing the hell out of his upright bass. His 311
drummer was shouting back at him while beating the hell out of the skins. The integrated big band was playing their hearts out, intense and on edge, sending up a complex, wailing blues—one section’s tight melodies competing with another’s seeming chaos—that threatened to tear the roof off. Word was that Mingus was notorious for beating up members of his band when they made mistakes while playing his complicated arrangements, but the finished product was like nothing else, an exhilarating and eclectic mix of bebop, Dixieland, and swing. The band also played many Duke Ellington compositions. Mingus—who had played with the Ellington band for years—worshiped the Duke even more than Abdullah Ibrahim did. Dizzy led me to a table where I met Max Roach, who seemed overjoyed to see me. He had heard from Dizzy that I was crazy about Clifford Brown, his late partner in the legendary quintet they had led together. Max Roach was an antiapartheid activist, and often organized pickets in front of the South African Mission to the United Nations. He was also a fervent civil rights advocate. I know Vusi Make from your country, and Maya Angelou, his wife,” Max told me. “They’re always at my house. When Miriam returns, my wife Abbey and I are gonna have a party for them. I’ll phone and ask her to bring you along. Vusi will be so happy to see you. He talks a lot about you. Welcome New York. We’re gonna win in South Africa, and soon!” Mingus was still playing when Dizzy checked his watch. He said we needed to get back to the Jazz Gallery for his next set. When we returned, we caught Monk’s last four songs, “Ruby, My Dear,” “Epistrophy,” “Crepuscule with Nellie,” and “Round Midnight,” all compositions that Abdullah Ibrahim had insisted we play with the Jazz Epistles. It was a mind‐blowing experience to hear Monk’s band with Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. My favorite albums were coming alive right in front of my 312
eyes. I could have been dreaming. When Dizzy was preparing to go back onstage, he called over his and Monk’s musicians and introduced them. They were all fascinated that I had just come from South Africa, and gave me a hearty welcome—Dizzy had been telling them about me. Before he took the stage for his next set, Dizzy asked us where we were headed. “Back uptown,” Leslie replied. “No, don’t do that,” Dizzy said. “Go down to the Half Note on Hudson and Spring Street. Go and catch John Coltrane. Hughie will enjoy that. Don’t go home now, oh no, ooowee.” We couldn’t say no. We grabbed a cab and headed down to SoHo. While Leslie was paying the taxi driver, I slouched next to her, exhausted, but while the taxi’s engine idled I could hear faint rumblings coming from inside the club—Coltrane on his soprano sax, Reggie Workman on bass, McCoy Tyner on piano, and Elvin Jones on drums, pumping away on “My Favorite Things.” I leaped out of the cab, itching to get inside. Dizzy was right. The joint was jam‐packed. Coltrane had recently formed a new group with whom he was stretching his music into ever greater complexity. But aside from that, his technique on the saxophone was devastating. He could play faster than anyone I’d heard before, and yet when he played slow ballads, his sound was the sweetest cry a saxophone could ever make. Every saxophone player of the time was overwhelmed by the man’s genius. After every one of his solos, you could almost hear the clanking sound of players around the world laying down their horns. Trane was really something else, literally, another thing altogether than anything I’d ever seen or heard up close. During their break, Reggie Workman, who knew Leslie, brought Trane, McCoy, and Elvin over to our table to say hello. They were excited to meet a musician from South Africa. After sitting through 313
their next set, Reggie wrote his phone number down on a drink coaster and insisted that I call him once I got settled. During the cab ride back to Miriam’s place, I was intoxicated by the evening’s experiences. Leslie was talking, but all I could do was stare at the skyscrapers on Sixth Avenue and occasionally glance in her direction. “My Favorite Things” kept ringing in my ears. I’ll never forget that moment. It was one o’clock in the morning, September 27. I had not had a good sleep since my last night in London, but that night I dreamed I was playing in Art Blakey’s band as a member of the Jazz Messengers. In all my years in South Africa, dreaming about what it would be like in America, none of those dreams came close to what I had actually experienced. In only four months since leaving South Africa, I had met Sammy Davis Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Max roach. I’d seen John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus perform. I knew I had to work hard to get to the level of the great talents I had just been with, but I was determined to get there. For all of its wonder, getting acclimated to life in New York was still challenging. Back in South Africa, election campaigns were reserved for the white world. Africans did not participate. When I arrived in New York, I had no idea how that world functioned. I had never had the opportunity to partake in this kind of freedom of expression. It was a bit overwhelming, arriving in America and finding the presidential campaigns between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon at fever pitch, Republicans and Democrats at each other’s throats, endless televised debates, round‐the‐clock flesh‐pumping and baby‐
kissing, and a lot of character assassination and mudslinging, which all seemed to be in a day’s work in the business of politics. My ignorance was obvious to jean, Jane, and Leslie, who tried to explain what all the madness was about. 314
As if this were not confusing enough, the annual United Nations General Assembly sessions were winding down. At center stage were Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had just moved his large delegation to Harlem’s hotel Theresa after the Waldorf‐Astoria management allegedly accused his group of plucking live chickens and cooking them in their rooms. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the UN lectern and declaring “We will bury you” managed to upstage Castro’s exodus to Harlem. The Congo’s Patrice Lumumba had come in for one day and returned home to the Congo’s murderous turmoil empty‐handed. A young Yasser Arafat was also in town, to scream about Israel. I was fascinated by the proceedings. The world’s ideological one‐upmanship was at its most intense at the United Nations, but basically everyone went back to their country without having achieved any significant victory. The world remained the same. Meanwhile, the civil rights uprisings were reaching a boiling point in the American South. White people in the South resorted to all sorts of official and mob violence—against black men, women, and children, and their white allies—and it quickly became clear that the freedom we in South Africa assumed existed for people of African origin in America was a mirage. There wasn’t too much difference in how most white people felt about black people throughout the West. I quickly realized that while I was in America, I needed to watch my black back and not think this place was that different from South Africa. The methods of racial terrorism might be applied differently here, but the disposition was the same. This was apartheid wearing a different hat. Imam Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslim movement was also making itself heard in the streets of New York and throughout black America. Malcolm X’s fiery speeches at highly disciplined rallies and 315
interviews denounced King’s approach and promoted an eye‐for‐an‐
eye position. It was obvious that the white media was attempting to create a major division among American blacks by making it appear that Malcolm and Martin were archenemies. McCarthyism was still in the air, and the Communist scare was on the lips of every American, although very few if any could articulate what they were so terrified of. Anyone who stood for liberation from oppression was automatically regarded as a Communist. This was the America I found. This was also the America where Ray Charles’s “Wha’d I Say” was the number‐one song, followed b Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Do the Twist,” the Impressions’ “It’s All Right,” and Sam Cooke’s “It’s Been a Long Time Comin’.” I was getting behind on my schooling—Miriam was to help me figure out enrollment and fees when she returned from her tour—but I was thoroughly enjoying my time in the city. During the day, I took care of Bongi and tutored her in English. At night I prowled the jazz clubs with Jean or Leslie, or went to the movies or the Apollo Theater. Back then, the Apollo was still a mecca for black performers, and really opened me up to that world in a new way. I remember going there to see “The Gospel Train,” featuring Reverend James Cleveland, Reverend Cecil Franklin, Shirley Caesar, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. We also checked out the James Brown Revue. I had never seen such an intense exhibition of high‐level energy. The man made Sammy Davis Jr. appear lazy. On another day, we grooved to a wonderful rhythm and blues revue featuring Jackie Wilson, Ruth Brown, Etta James, Solomon Burke, Billy Wright, and many others. We reveled to the Ray Charles Revue and the Stax Memphis Revue, featuring Rufus Thomas, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, and Booker T and the MGs. I also had my first intense brush with salsa music when we caught the Latino Variety Revue with Machito’s Orchestra featuring his sister Xaviera; Celia Cruz with Pacheco’s band; La Lupe; Tito Puente; Tito Rodriguez; Willie Colon; Mongo Santamaria; and 316
the Palmieri Brothers. The Apollo also had a jazz revue with the Horace Silver Quintet, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Slide Hampton Orchestra, Les McAnn’s trio, Gloria Lynne, Stanley Turrentine, and the Cannonball Quintet, featuring Nancy Wilson. These great musicians were a major influence on the jazz and mbhaqanga groups I’d played with back home, not to mention my own personal approach to music. I would sit in the Apollo with the animated throngs who screamed and testified at the players they loved, and all I could think about was how much I wished some of my friends in South Africa could be right here with me. Although rhythm and blues, gospel, and salsa were basically new horizons for me, it all felt like I’d been with all these people in another life. The thing I wanted to learn most from these genres was an understanding of their language and slang. This was an English I had yet to decipher. The wonderful thing about music is that, in the end, language don’t mean a thing because when the Latinos hit that stage, I felt I understood everything they were singing about. My biggest wish was to be able to master their dances. . . shiiit, those folks can move! Sometimes when we had overdosed on music, we would catch the comedy revues and see Slappy White, Lawanda Paige, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, and Nipsey Russell. More than the humor, I took great joy from the fact that people could make fun of just about anything they wanted to ridicule, whether it was the police, the president, music, dance, white folks, black folks, old folks, sex, gender, joy, pain, life, death—you name it. Where I came from, people were so thin‐skinned that if you tried to make fun of people and their circumstances, whether you did it on or off stage, you’d be taking your life in your hands. Back then, admission to the Apollo was only one dollar, and you could sit in the theater and watch the same show five times from noon until midnight. I was quickly 317
forgetting about the main purpose of my coming to America, which was school. After about three weeks, Miriam returned to New York. I had not seen her since earlier that summer, when she came to London to do her BBC television show. As usual, Miriam walked into the apartment with her arms full of gifts for everybody. One evening she threw a welcoming party for me. She invited several of her friends, her band members, Dizzy and Lorraine Gillespie, and the Kerinas. This was the first time I met Dizzy’s elegant and warm wife. Lorraine told me I reminded her of Miles Davis when he had first come to New York from East St. Louis, twenty years earlier. While I was enjoying myself, Dizzy asked me to walk with him to the store to get some lighter fluid for his pipe. As we walked around the block, he pulled out his Sherlock Holmes‐looking pipe, stuffed it with an aromatic tobacco, lit it, and passed it to me after he’d taken a few draws. I had never smoked a pipe before, but at Dizzy’s insistence, I got the hang of it. “Hughie, is that jacket the only coat you’ve got? If so, you’re gonna freeze your little behind off in that little Italian frock coat, man. It gets colder’n a motherfucker here. You’re gonna need a real winter coat if you wanna live until the spring of ’61 boy. Tell you what, meet me on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway on Monday around three, at a store called Webber and Heilbroner. You meet me there and let’s get you a proper winter coat. Otherwise you gone die in that little thing you wearin’ when it starts to snow here. Then we gonna have to dig you out the snow and thaw you out. Oooweee, ha, ha, he, he.” Once back in the apartment, I realized that Diz had packed some mean smoke in that pipe of his, because all I could pay attention to was Ray Charles on the phonograph singing “Just for a Thrill” with mellow strings and voices in the background. I couldn’t stop smiling, 318
and I answered everybody with a “yeah” and a grin. Soon I was lost in Ray’s “Georgia” and everybody stopped paying any attention to me; they just carried on with their conversations. It seemed like hours later when the visitors said good night. I stood up to shake hands with everybody. When I got to Dizzy and Lorraine, she gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek and said, “Welcome to New York, and don’t you forget to meet Dizzy on Monday, boy.” Dizzy winked at me as he followed his wife up the stairs. “Oooweee, good, ain’t it?” Dizzy whispered, referring to the pipe. All the visitors left, and by the time Miriam returned to the apartment after seeing everyone out, I was out cold in my bed in the guest room. The next day we all went to visit Central Park and some of the city’s museums. Miriam told me that Belafonte was in the process of setting up a non‐profit foundation that would help me through school, but in the meantime she would take care of my tuition. The next morning we hailed a cab and went to the Manhattan School of Music. I expected the school to be a sprawling, tree‐lined campus like the ones I had seen in American movies. I kept looking for signs of students sporting jackets and sweaters with the school’s name printed on them. When the cab pulled up to 206 East 105th Street, it turned out to be a pieced‐together series of three‐story brick buildings that used to be an elementary school. I was to study Music Theory 101, Music Literature 101, French Grammar, English Literature, American History, Brass Ensemble, Chorus, and Psychology. I would have private trumpet lessons with Mr. Vacchiano, the first trumpeter of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. I felt truly blessed and in immeasurable debt to Miriam, who had paid my fare to America and was housing me and paying for my tuition, clothing, and living expenses. When I tried to thank her, all she said was, “Hughie, we are family. Let’s look out for each other. Work hard and let’s keep trying our best to find ways to improve the plight of our people who are suffering back home in 319
South Africa.” Although I found the enslavement of my people by Verwoerd and his minions sickening, I had never thought I could ever be in a position to effect any changes against apartheid through music. When Miriam spoke of improving the plight of our people, it was the first time in my life that I had been inspired to consider the possibility of ever being able to rattle the complacency of Afrikaner racism through my life’s work. Soon after we returned to the apartment, a limousine arrived and Miriam was off to La Guardia Airport, embarking on a three‐week tour with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Later that afternoon, went down to 57th and Broadway as specified by Dizzy, and waited outside the Webber and Heilbroner store After about twenty minutes, a tall white man tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, are you Hughie, by any chance?” “Yes,” I replied. The man ushered me into the store. “Mr. Gillespie has asked me to supply you with a warm coat for the upcoming winter,” he said. “Let me show you what we have in stock.” I was still reeling from Miriam’s generosity, and now this. I picked out a modestly priced brown cashmere overcoat, thanked the salesman, and left. As soon as I got back to Miriam’s, I called Dizzy to thank him, but Lorraine answered the phone. She told me Diz had left that morning for Europe. “Dizzy’s gonna be really happy,” Lorraine said. He’s been so worried about you freezing to death. I’ll be sure and tell him that you called. Good luck in our studies, and take care of yourself. God bless you, darling.” The next morning I formally began my life in America. It was a routine that would last a little more than a year. At six‐thirty, I’d get Bongi up and get her set for school—fix her breakfast, comb and braid her hair—and we’d be out the door by seven‐thirty. 320
I made friends with some of my classmates: Jimmy Lee, a trombonist from Mount Vernon, who wore thick‐rimmed, bebop‐style glasses and talked a lot about jazz and came from an allegedly wealthy Jewish family; Tammy Brown, a beautiful black girl from Long Island, who was a voice major studying opera; Fielder Floyd, a black trumpet player from Alabama, whose heavy Southern accent had me calling him “Feelflow” for two weeks until I saw his name on one of his books; jet‐black Larry Willis from Harlem, who was already an outstanding opera tenor and basketball player; and John Cartwright, a bass player from Mount Vernon, who was a member of the school symphony orchestra and an accomplished jazz musician. Also in the orchestra was High Robinson, a white trombonist from Jackson, Mississippi, who really wanted to play jazz but only knew classical music. There were a few Asian students from Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong—all outstanding classical musicians. My fellow students included leading members of the symphony orchestra, opera soloists, top composers, and leading jazz musicians like bassists Ron Carter and Richard Davis, pianists Herbie Hancock, Mike Abene, Dave Grusin, and Larry Willis, drummer Phil Rosen, trumpeters Donald Byrd and Booker Little, and many other young musicians who would later become icons of American music. It was in school that I first met Astley Fennel, a trombonist from the Bronx, whose family originally came from Jamaica; Susan Belink, a mezzo soprano from Long Island, whose father was one of New York’s top synagogue cantors; Yoshiko Ito, a great Japanese opera singer; Howie Folta, an outstanding percussionist from Brooklyn; and Sharon Johnson, a beautiful half‐Cherokee French horn player from Cincinnati. The place was like a young United Nations music conference, overflowing with amazing talents and scores of wannabes from almost all over the world. Many of these people would become major influences in my life. Some remain my dearest friends to this day. 321
On my second morning I was introduced to my trumpet teacher, Mr. Vacchiano, who quickly decided he would be the wrong tutor for me. Vacchiano only taught classical music. I was transferred to Cecil Collins, ex‐lead trumpeter for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Collins had lost his front teeth in a hit‐and‐run car accident at the pinnacle of his career. Most of the non‐symphonic trumpet players were assigned to Collins. For four years I had been playing a German‐made F.S. Huller trumpet, the one Louis Armstrong had sent to the Huddleston Band. I had never washed the inside of the horn. On the day of my first trumpet lesson, Collins asked me to play a tune of my choice. After hearing a few notes, he abruptly stopped me. “Your trumpet has leaks,” he said. “The only reason you don’t know it is because dirt inside is blocking all the holes in it. Come with me and I’ll show you what I mean.” My stomach sank at his matter‐of‐fact dismissal of my cherished instrument; I followed him to the bathroom like a sheep to slaughter. He walked over to the porcelain sink, holding my prized Louis Armstrong trumpet like it was a piece of junk. Collins handed me my mouthpiece and then ran a twig through the stem of my trumpet. When he removed the twig, out came loads of green and gray slimy mold. That shit had been stuck up there for years. He then ran water through the horn and foul‐smelling, caked gunk came splattering out of the bell in large, green, nauseating blobs. I was embarrassed beyond comprehension. Back in the practice room, Collins handed me my horn and said, “Now try to blow that thing.” I tried, but the horn was leaking like a sieve from around the valves, producing a flat, airy sound more like a leaking exhaust muffler system than a trumpet. I wanted to crawl my humiliated ass out of there and hide. “You have to go to Manny’s Music Store on 48th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues and ask for a Vincent Bach trumpet with a 7C 322
mouthpiece of the same name. These will cost you around one hundred and fifty dollars. You also must buy an Arban Cornet Method exercise book, for about twelve dollars. When you have those things, come back to me and I’ll teach you how to play the trumpet. With all due respect to Louis Armstrong, that thing is now an old scrap that even he would be unwilling to blow on.” Cecil Collins left the room with me standing there holding Satchmo’s trumpet in my right hand. I was totally shattered and speechless. I didn’t have one hundred sixty‐two dollars, and I had no idea where to get it. Two weeks had rolled by, and I could not take a lesson on the instrument that was my major. Collins kept calling me to his tutorial room to ask when was I getting a proper trumpet. “You are falling behind. This is your major. You are scheduled for brass ensemble, too. By the time you join us, if you ever do, it will be too late because we will be way ahead. Remember, with a new mouthpiece and trumpet, you’re going to have to start from scratch. Can’t you let me talk to Miss Makeba or Harry Belafonte about the urgency of this matter?” “No sir,” I replied. “I’ll figure out something.” My new world was caving in on me. I could never go to Miriam and ask her for money after all she had already done. I had not yet met Belafonte, and the only money I had to keep me going was what Miriam had left for food and transportation for me and Bongi. Miriam called one day from Canada to check on things, and Leslie told her about my predicament. Miriam was furious that I hadn’t let her know. She instructed Leslie to go and see Alfred Braunstein, her accountant. He gave Leslie the money. The next day I walked into Manny’s Music Store and purchased my first new trumpet. On the bus ride to school, I thanked my ancestors for their intercession. I also gave thanks to Trevor Huddleston and Bob Hill and Old Man Sauda 323
and Louis Armstrong. I whispered a very special thank‐you for Miriam Makeba. I got off the bus and marched up 105th Street with a brand‐new trumpet in a leather case, complete with the new 7C mouthpiece and the Arban Cornet Method book. Collins smiled as I showed him my new prized possessions. I was now a full‐fledged student at the Manhattan School of Music. My American History teacher also taught at Columbia University, and hosted an educational television program on the subject on the Public Broadcasting System, which was shown throughout the U.S. He opened my mind and placed into context many of the distortions I had harbored about the United States. I particularly gravitated to discussion of racism, civil rights, and the other human‐rights debates. Discussions of communism, Castro, Russia, Malcolm X, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King fascinated me, as did people and organizations like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Orville Faubus, George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and the white Southern Baptist leadership. As part of the large group of Africans immigrating to the United States to study, I was getting a first‐class education in and outside the classroom. A few years later, through Belafonte, I performed a fund‐raiser for SNCC. I will never forget an episode in Mr. Miller’s English class. We were discussing George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Miller began comparing the pigs in the book to Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Patrice Lumumba, among others. My blood began boiling. I raised my hand and objected to Miller vilifying African liberation leaders. I was joined by Astley Fennel and Fielder Floyd, the only other black male students in the class. In the ensuing war of words, I was branded a Communist and Astley and Fielder were accused of being disciples of Malcolm X by some of the white conservative students, while we branded them children of the Klan. We had nearly come to blows when Mr. Miller, who looked like a U.S. Marines captain, screamed at the top of his voice, “Stop, stop, stop!” He stormed out of the room 324
and returned with Dean Whitford, who calmly dismissed the class and asked us to follow her to her office. They accused me of attempting to create a political forum out of a classroom discussion, which surprised me—I was just responding to what I thought were unfair characterizations of the heroes of African liberation. I stood my ground and told them that I hadn’t come all the way to America to listen to the denigration of people who were dedicated to the liberation of African peoples. Neither was I in the country to be converted into an American right‐wing patriot. I had come to America to get an education, and I demanded that Mr. Miller be the one to be spoken to, because he was provoking conflict and confrontation in his English class. The matter was never brought up again, and Miller backed off from making derogatory statements. The white students with whom we had the confrontation never spoke to us again. Psychology was a class that I could not understand. Freud, Jung, libido—what the hell was this shit all about? It wasn’t until I went to England thirty‐seven years later for substance addiction recovery that I finally understood what psychology was all about. It took that long to break down the walls that had been constructed in my psyche by township life, discrimination, ethnic cleansing, booze, drugs, and sex. For decades I was certain that psychology was some white conspiracy to brainwash people of African origin into being complacent, obedient niggers. I was not stupid; I was just suspicious and not that keen on the subject. But all in all, I was doing well at the conservatory. Word had gotten around about my jazz improvisational prowess, and when I would do my classical exercises in the basement practice rooms, I’d occasionally break off into some jazz licks or standard ballads. The room would become crowded with other students, amazed at this African taking off on their music. Sometimes Mr. Sokoloff, the treasurer, would burst into the room to remind me that I was in a 325
school of classical music and those rooms were meant for the furtherance of expertise in that medium and certainly not for “jazz riffing.” I was accused of reflecting badly on my fellow students and even my home continent! It was always mentioned that the Ghanaian music professor Dr. Nketia, who had been at the school during Modern Jazz Quartet leader and pianist John Lewis’s time, had never done that sort of thing. This was odd because so many of the jazz players of that time had attended the school; in fact, some of its most accomplished alumni, jazz heads like John Lewis and Max Roach, were always mentioned proudly in speeches and conversations by the school’s administration. It blew my mind that I had to apologize for playing jazz—but it was just another eye‐opener to me of the double standards I’d be facing in American life. In my class, I got very close to Astley Fennel, Larry Willis, and Fielder Floyd. It turned out that Larry played a little jazz piano. We hung out a lot at Astley’s place in the Bronx, where he lived with his widowed Jamaican dad. They had an old piano, and Larry would accompany Astley and me on piano on popular bebop and blues compositions, plus some American standards. Astley had a tin ear, but we hung with him mostly because of the piano at his house. Larry, on the other hand, had great potential. Fielder and I were sworn disciples of Clifford Brown. We spent a lot of time trading the great trumpeter’s phrases and gushing over his incredible prowess on the horn. Fielder was rooming with Marcus Belgrave, who played lead trumpet in the Ray Charles band and had been a personal friend of Clifford’s. He was also close to Brown’s family in Wilmington, Delaware, a stone’s throw away from his home in Chester, Pennsylvania. Marcus and Fielder shared an apartment around 158th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights, were we went after school to pick up pointers from Marcus and ask millions of questions about Clifford Brown. The two trumpeters usually lit up a joint and offered me a drag, but I 326
always cordially declined. From time to time I would notice them going into a nod and rubbing their noses furiously, but at first it didn’t occur to me that they were on heroin—their behavior wasn’t nearly as severe as that of the addicts I saw nodding on the sidewalks of Harlem around the Apollo Theater. When I first saw those cats, I asked Leslie what kind of booze they were drinking and she said, “That ain’t no booze, honey. Those motherfuckers are falling over from shooting heroin.” I had never heard of heroin before that. When it finally dawned on me that Marcs and Fieldler were knocking themselves out with H, I was quietly shocked, but I never said anything to either of them. About seven years later, Fielder Floyd died from a heroin overdose. Jane and Mburumba often brought their children, Kakuna and Mandume, to Miriam’s apartment for me to babysit while they went out to one reception or another. Sometimes when Leslie and Jean stayed over with Bongi, I would go to the Kerina flat and babysit there. The Kerinas became like family to me—they were generous and funny and a total joy to be with. Of course, their home cooking and wonderful leftovers gave Bongi and me a very good reason to stop over regularly for a quick hello and good‐bye, with the full knowledge that Jane would insist that we sit down and have a quick bite to eat. But their house had more than good eating; I also met many prominent political scientists and activists through the Kerinas, among them the great African‐American writer John Henrik Clarke, who was also a radical scholar of international African politics and one of America’s foremost civil rights authors and teachers. Then there was the prolific author John Killens; artist/sculptor John Peoples; author Louis Lomax; and Namibian freedom fighters like Kozonguizi, Sam Nujoma, and Ben Guriab, who were presenting petitions at the United Nations on behalf of their people. Discussions at the Kerina household could go on into the early mornings, with heated confrontations between parties holding different opinions on 327
protest, racism, history, genetics, philosophy, psychology, and liberation. One night when we popped over, Lomax was holding court. He had just published a book in which he argued that even though he had African blood in his veins, the fact was that he was light‐skinned and his closest forebears were of German origin, which made him more a white man than a Negro. John Henrik Clarke, John Killens, Miriam Makeba, Maya Angelou, Vusi Make, Leslie Reed, Jean Johnson, and a few Africans were at the Kerinas for this discussion. Even though everybody tore into Louis Lomax with scathing and sometimes venomous criticism, he would not stand down. “You are a disgrace to the black race,” someone would hiss at him. But Louis Lomax, in his Brooks Brothers suite, Ivy League cordovans, and horn‐rimmed glasses, his charcoal‐gray, semi‐straight hair carefully groomed, would sit back in his chair, flash a very confident smile, and reply, “How can I be a disgrace to a group of people I don’t belong to in any manner of speaking?”—a question to which the gathering found it very difficult to come up with a rebuttal except for the stock phrases like “Look in the mirror,” or “One drop of black blood makes you a black man,” or “Go to the South, hug a white man or kiss a white woman, and let’s see how many hours you’ll live after that.” Lomax would fire back, “Many white civil rights activists have been murdered in the South. I wouldn’t be the first. Stop being racist and emotional. Give me some logical answers.” It was a useless case, but Lomax was a grand provocateur—I was still trying to figure out where I fit into all of this, so I just sat back and watched the show. He went on to conduct live debates on television with Malcolm X, other black activists and a number of white conservatives, and with Southern racists who thought he was just a crazy ole nigra. 328
Even outside of the Kerina’s house, I found myself surrounded by people who were revolutionaries—whether they were African or American, artists or activists, it all seemed to come together magically at that moment. Miriam took me to a party at the home of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach in honor of Vusi Make and his wife, Maya Angelou. Maya was starring in an off‐Broadway production of jean Genets play The Blacks. Bra Vusi, as we called him back home, had worked at Drum magazine and then become a fiery antiapartheid orator in the Vereeniging township of Evaton and its environs. When Robert Sobukwe was detained for treason and sent to Robben Island for life after his death sentence was commuted, Vusi was one of the people from the Pan‐African Congress’s leadership who went abroad for military leadership training. Vusi ended up I n Ghana, where he met Maya. They returned to the United States together—she to pursue her acting career, he to make representations at the United Nations and establish solidarity with American civil rights movements and other activists who were passionate about the liberation of people of the African Diaspora. Mburumba took me to Harlem one day when he had an appointment with Malcolm X at the Muslim‐run restaurant on 116th Street. Harlem always gripped my soul in a kindred kind of way. It reminded me of the communal vibes I experienced in Sophiatown and Alexandra. Just as the townships were cultural kaleidoscopes and key political meeting places for the ANC in South Africa, Harlem, a black metropolis, was the magnet for intellectuals, artists, musicians, black nationalists, and Pan‐Africanists. A few years later Langston Hughes invited me to his home in Harlem. Hughes told me that in 1923 he had traveled by freighter to Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Belgian Congo, Angola, and Guinea. His first published poem was also his most famous. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was written when he was only nineteen: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow 329
Of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I’ve bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi. . . He gave me a book of his poems that moved me so much I wrote a song to one of them, “Night Owl.” Contrary to the angry, hostile image the white conservative press had painted of Malcolm X, in person he was handsome, hospitable, and witty—and gifted with an ability to gain your intimacy immediately; Malcolm spoke to me as if he had known me all his life. Following a lengthy conversation, he stood and gave me a firm, brotherly handshake. “One day soon, all your leaders will come out of jail to rule your country and bring peace, love, and joy to your people.” His words were not unfamiliar—lots of American activists shared similar sentiments with me all the time—but for some reason, coming from him, they struck me as more prophetic than kind and reassuring. In that era, Malcolm was in the rare company of Miles Davis, Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King, and Sidney Poitier, an African‐
American man who seemed to be completely unintimidated by any kind of white people, racist or liberal. His first definition of himself was as a man, one who was only black by biological happenstance and equal in all ways to any man on earth. It was only when people came on as though they were better than he was that he didn’t waste time putting them in their place. Malcolm X commanded awesome respect even from people who usually felt superior around blacks. He became, from that moment forward, a model for me of how a man of African origin should project. When Thanksgiving came around, Miriam took Bongi with her to California, where she was on the road with Belafonte. I was left alone 330
in New York. I really had a rough time understanding the logic of Thanksgiving, watching people become suddenly feverish about buying turkeys. Marcus Belgrave persuaded me to come to Chester, Pennsylvania, with him and Fielder for the long holiday weekend. We boarded a Greyhound bus in New York, and three hours later we were in tiny Chester. We walked from the terminal to Marcus’s home, a few hundred yards away, where his extended family was waiting. As soon as we got to the house, they were all over us, happy to see old Marcus and “mighty glad” that he had brought Fielder and me for Thanksgiving. Marcus’s family was from the South, so Fielder was no surprise to them. They were more than fascinated, however, with a real live African. They bombarded me with an unrelenting stream of questions. I was shocked at how little Americans knew about the continent I came from. They believed the outrageous, stereotypical bullshit about Africans still living in the Stone Age gathered from Tarzan films, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Jungle Jim cinema serials, comic books, and other ignorant portrayals. Black Americans seemed to have been programmed to avoid and deny any historical or genealogical connection with Africa. The majority of them were always quick to say, “No, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with Africa, man! I’m pure, full‐blooded American. You better believe it. Yeah, boy!” However, most of those from the South were totally different. They easily saw how much we had in common; some recalled their grandparents’ folktales, which preserved a connection to Africa. Marcus’s parents and aunts and uncles told me about how their own parents had been members of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Movement, which was cruelly sabotaged by the government’s intelligence community during the height of the “Back to Africa” campaign. Many had contributed substantial amounts of their earnings over many years so that they could be part of Garvey’s revivalist crusade, only to be disappointed when he was systematically railroaded by 331
the American government and totally destroyed. When he was finally jailed on some trumped‐up charges, many who had hoped that the “Back to Africa” dream would become a reality were deeply disappointed. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to discover that many African‐Americans did not buy the “Africans are savages” propaganda. I found out that a considerable percentage of this community were informed about what was happening in Africa, especially older people with a Southern background and those who had taken it upon themselves to do intensive research on the history of the continent and its people. It was understandable that there would be such ignorance about Africa in the Western world. There was clearly a concerted effort by the conservative establishment to ensure that people who had African or Native American ancestry knew as little as possible about their history‐the past was a portal into anger. On the other hand, we Africans were peddled a vision of blacks in the Americas that suggested they were living the high live—all we ever saw were artists surrounded by glitter and glamour. It came as a shock to my generation, who came to the West in the 1950s and the 1060s, to find that wherever black people lived—Europe, the Caribbean, America—
they were surrounded mostly by poverty, bigotry, squalor, crime, discrimination, and institutionalized murder. This left many of us wildly disillusioned, but it was also the beginning, for many of us, of a commitment to forge solidarity with these communities. Marcus Belgrave came from a tightly knit, working‐class family. Marcus, Fielder and I shared a bedroom with three beds on the third floor of their old but sturdy Colonial‐style house, which had large downstairs lounges, a wrap‐around porch, huge landscaped gardens, and a large kitchen that bustled with oversized women cooking beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, rice, hominy grits, cornbread, black‐eye peas, turkeys, hams, gumbo, ribs, sauces, pumpkins, cobblers, cakes, cranberry sauce, and everything else that 332
came with the holiday. The kitchen rang with laughter and gossip, while the men settled on the porch to down one beer after another, drink whiskey, gin, brandy, rum, wine, watch television around the clock, and argue wildly about the state of the world with the little knowledge they had at their command. I was grilled endlessly by preschoolers and octogenarians and everyone in between about Africa. “What’d y’all eat over there?” “Y’all got telebision?” “When’d you learn to speak English so good?” “You always wore dese clothes an’ shoes?” “Y’all have cars and roads over dere?” “When y’all gone throw all dem white folks outta dere?” “D’ y’all have fruits and d’ y’all live in houses?” “What yo’ daddy do for a livin’?” “How you like it in America?” “Y’all go to church?” “Where’d you learn to play music?” “Show me some a y’all’s dances.” 333
Later that evening, Fielder listened to me as I continued talking about my home. With a cynical smile on his face, he said to me, “Tell me somethin’, man, how come you talking like a white man all de time?” “What do you mean?” I asked, rather surprised. “Man, you always talking dat‐tap‐de‐rap‐de‐tap kinda shit, man. Why can’t you talk like no black man? How come you ain’t talking like me and Marcus, man?” It took some fifteen minutes to try to explain my background, how English wasn’t even my language and that I had only been speaking it daily for less than a year. “Shit, man, that’s wild! What you been talking all dis time?” “Oh,” I answered, “Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Nbdele, Afrikaans, Pedi, Shangaan.” “Wait a minute,” Marcus jumped in. “You mean to tell me that you speak all them languages?” Before I could answer, Fielder said, “Say somethin’ in dat shit that sounds like you hittin’ two woodblocks together, man.” I said some words in Xhosa, and they were mesmerized. Some were laughing, some wanted to look inside my mouth. All of them were trying to imitate me. The laughter started all over again as they hopelessly tried to click their tongues like me. “Shit, man, that’s some wild shit. How’d you do dat? Tell you what, you teach me how to talk like a black man, okay?” “Okay,” I answered Fielder, as he and the others couldn’t stop breaking up from trying the Xhosa clicks. “Sheet, maan, do dat again. 334
Hey momma, come hear what Hugh’s language sounds like. Hey, Hughie, talk dat stuff again.” Marcus’s folks were all stunned when I rattled off a sentence that was full of all kinds of clicks. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said one of his uncles. “Child, y’all talk like dat back home? Well, Lawd help me out. Hey Lawanda, come down here and listen how dis chile talking dat talk from down where he come from.” The fascination about my strange tongues went on past midnight. The next morning Marcus Fielder, and I took a twenty‐minute train trip to Wilmington, Delaware, to visit Clifford Brown’s home, where I got to meet my hero’s widow and son. They were fascinated by the fact that I had idolized Clifford from so far away and had taken the trouble to come and see his home. I was treated like a long‐lost relation. I was also introduced to Clifford’s trumpet teacher, who tried to explain his tutoring methods, but I was too sad thinking about Clifford to even understand what he was trying to say. We continued on to Philadelphia, where Marcus knew lots of musicians, and we spent most of that afternoon and early evening jamming with them. We worked over Miles Davis compositions like “So What” and “Milestones,” standards like “How High the Moon,” “All the Things You Are,” “Cherokee,” and “Body and Soul,” Charlie Parker’s “Straight No Chaser,” Duke Ellington’s “A Train” and “Perdido”; the list is endless. The sixties were the golden age of jam sessions—they were very competitive, all about separating the boys from the men when it came to fast tempos and intricate chord structures. They also helped us all get with the latest songs and innovations. This was how word got around quickly if there was a talented new musician on the scene. The sessions were a kind of information service about new talent as well as informal jazz workshops. It was a wonderful day for me, and word got around on 335
the East Coast bebop grapevine that there was a bad lil’ trumpet player from Africa who sounded a lil’ bit like Clifford Brown. Thanksgiving 1960 was my introduction to African‐American family life. “Y’all be sure to come back an’ visit again, y’hear? Don’ forgit to write yo’ mama,” said Marcus’s mother, hugging me tightly with a wet kiss on my cheek. “Be sho’ to tell her you was wid us over Thanksgivin’. It’ll make her feel good to know ya had a decent home‐
cooked meal.” Most of Marcus’s siblings and cousins walked with us to the bus terminal and bade us farewell with all kinds of screams and hollers. When the bus pulled off, some of them were screaming unintelligible Zulu and Xhosa words, popping their fingers inside their mouths to make a clicking sound and laughing hysterically. By the time we pulled into New York’s Port Authority Terminal at 42nd Street, I was talking like a black man and Fielder was “’sho proud” that he could understand “what de fuck” I was sayin’. Back in New York, I had Miriam’s apartment to myself. I was spending most of my time at the Kerinas’ in between going to school, babysitting, club‐hopping with Fielder and Marcus, jamming uptown with Larry Willis and bassist Eddie Gomez, trumpeter Larry Hall, drummers Al Foster and Henry Jenkins, and other ex‐members of the Music and Arts High School youth band, who were now attending Eastman, Julliard, or the Manhattan School of Music. Larry and I were regulars at John Mehegan’s jazz workshops on the Julliard campus, and John was now giving him private lessons. Larry was beginning to play the hell out of the piano. One evening Dizzy invited me to come down to Birdland, a jazz club named after Charlie Parker. He was playing there for two weeks. The place was jam‐packed, and a gang of musicians were standing at the bar. During Dizzy’s break, the Slide Hampton band, featuring Freddie Hubbard, took the stage. Dizzy introduced me to Horace 336
Silver, James Moody, Errol Garner, Melba Liston, Quincy Jones, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus, Booker Little, Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, and many other legends and stars who were in the joint. I was semi‐hypnotized from being introduced to all these giants. Then we got to Miles, still my idol. He was surrounded by scores of beautiful women and the musicians from his band—Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Miles shook my hand with a scowl and barked at me in his raspy sandpaper voice. “You from South Africa? You know Jeff?” he asked. I was tongue‐tied. “Jeff. Who’s Jeff?” “Sheeeet. You don’t know Jeff? Diz,” Miles turned to Dizzy, “This mother‐fucka don’t know Jeff. He ain’t from no South African, man.” He growled and then, turning back to me again, he said, “You from South Africa, man.” He growled and then, turning back to me again, he said, “You from South Africa an’ don’t know Jeff. You full o’ shit, man. You don’t know Jeff?” His face was almost in mine. “Miles, who de fuck is Jeff, man? Where he at an’ what de fuck do he do?” said Dizzy to Miles in an irritated tone. “Dis ma’fucker don’t know Jeff. He ain’t from no South Africa, man. Jeff’s in Sweden, baddest bass player from down there, man,” Miles replied. I jumped in quickly, “Oooh, you mean Hoojah. Hoojah got me my first job, man. Hoojah is my uncle, too. I’m sue Hoojah told you off when you first met, didn’t he?” Miles looked at me quizzically. “Hoojah. Who the fuck is Hoojah?” 337
“Hoojah is Jeff,” I said. “Jeff is Hoojah. You don’t know Hoojah?” I shot back. “Hoojah can be really tough, can’t he?” Miles smiled. “Hey, you know Jeff? Dat mafucker called me a small boy; tol me I don’t know shit, dat Dizzy an’ Bird taught me everything. He blew me away. I ain’t never met nobody wid da kinda confidence like Jeff. Jeff’s one bad ma’fucker. Sheeet. You know Jeff?” Miles hugged me and called Paul Chambers over. “Hey, Paul, Hugh here know Jeff in Sweden, say he got him his first gig. Sheeet man, you know Jeff? Jeff a bad ma’fucker.” Miles couldn’t stop smiling. Paul Chambers gave me a limp handshake, said, “Hey,” and then went back to talking with Jimmy Cobb. Dizzy left me standing with Miles and his entourage. He was working the room, greeting friends and laughing his famous “Oooweee” laugh. Miles kept looking at me and shaking his head. “Sheet, you know Jeff? Jeff’s a bad ma’fucker.” On the afternoon of December 12, 1960, I was having a rum and coke with Peter and Bonnie in her apartment. It was cloudy, with a light drizzle. I was looking onto 82nd Street from Bonnie’s first‐floor window at the drizzle when I noticed that it was not frizzling anymore. These were snowflakes—small ones at first, and then they grew thicker and thicker, slowly blanketing the block slightly dusting the tarred surfaces with a white carpet of snow—my very first snow. “Let’s go outside and I’ll take a picture of you to send home,” Peter said. “Get your coat and a scarf so you don’t catch a cold.” By the time I came back from downstairs, where I could see the snowfall increasing onto our back porch, kids were already making snowballs, hurling them at each other excitedly as the white stuff came down in bigger and bigger flakes. 338
We soon got tired of throwing snowballs and returned to Bonnie’s for a few more hot rum and cinnamon drinks and watched as the snow came down harder and harder, eventually making the street invisible as it got darker outside. Even the streetlights were getting shrouded in the heavy storm. I went back downstairs around nine‐thirty and shortly after that passed out while watching the news on television. I woke up around seven that morning and it was still snowing. Mayor Wagner was n the television screen, announcing that all schools would be closed until further notice. Snow removers were being brought out to clear the impenetrable streets. The city had come to a standstill. I was lost in the whiteness. I was freezing my ass off in New York City. I spent Christmas day with the Kerinas, wondering just how many people had been killed in South Africa in car accidents, fights, and by the police. I missed my family, but I wasn’t missing my country yet. The weather warmed up a few days after Christmas. I decided to go and catch John Coltrane’s group at the Half Note. The snow was melting so fast that torrents of draining water were cascading down the gutters. By the time I entered the club it had begun to rain. I was wearing my Italian raincoat and trademark eight‐piece black cap, certain that the warm weather would hold for a few days. By the time Coltrane’s group went on for their second set, the rain was turning to snow again. I stayed for two more sets while another snowstorm was developing. As it turned colder, the melting water turned to ice. By closing time at four the following morning, the snow had stopped, but the temperature had gone arctic. People were battling for taxis, shoving and cussing each other. When some of us tried to go for the subway train, we found out that public transportation had been suspended once more. There were more and more desperate people the farther uptown I walked. I tried to go across town, thinking that the East Side would be better. It was worse. By the time I got to Grand Central, I could not feel my feet in my shoes. I walked the next forty blocks home alongside hundreds of people who were freezing just 339
like me. When I finally got home, my hands were so iced I could hardly hold my keys. I rang Peter’s bell with tears running down my cheeks. Shocked at the state that I was in, Peter ran a tub of lukewarm water and made me put my hands in it while he made a hot Irish whisky for me. My feet were stiff and my socks were all iced up. By the time I was able to open my apartment door, I had finished my sixth Irish whisky and was still shivering, seven hours after I had left the club. Peter kept reminding me that what I went through was only spring for Eskimos. I didn’t think that was too funny. For the next three days I stayed indoors, terrified to venture out in that cold again. On New Year’s Eve, Jane and Mburumba came and yanked me out of the house and took me to their apartment, where we watched on TV hundreds of thousands of people bring in the New Year in Times Square. We stayed up till dawn talking about Kennedy, Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, Mayor Rizzo of Philadelphia, Governors Faubus and Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Che Guevera, Castro, Lumumba, Ed Sullivan, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Namibia, SWAPO, the ANC, the Congo crisis, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Miles, Dizzy, Miriam, Belafonte, Mandela, Khrushchev, Hitler, Native Americans, Langston Hughes, Alexandra Township, John Henrik Clarke, Tito, Lenin, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Wilma Rudolph, Sugar Ray Robinson, hair‐straightening, silly old Louis Lomax, girls, boys, and our parents. After some initial struggles in school, I developed a determined routine, which helped me pick up the slack. Every day after fetching Bongi, I would first assist her with homework, then I would practice the trumpet lessons Cecil Collins had given me for the next five hours, with breaks to fix supper for us and walk to the store on the corner for some need or the other. After putting Bongi to bed, I would do my academic and music homework, prepare the next day’s clothes for us, and on certain nights do laundry and ironing. Bongi 340
and I always washed the dishes together, with her doing most of the talking about her new school, her friends, her grandmother, and her cousin Nhlanhla, or singing one of the many songs she had composed in her little head. When Miriam was home, the three of us would sing together the songs of Christina Makeba, her mother, a traditional healer. Miriam and Bongi taught me many beautiful songs from this genre, “Bajabula Bonke” (the Healing Song), “Ngi ya Khuyeka” (I Am Suffering), “Bay a Jabula” (The Ancestors and the Healers are Rejoicing), “Dzinorabiro” (I have Treasured My Traditional Heritage from My Forefathers), “Nyankwabe,” “Icala,” and others—singing them was itself a healing. I attended John Mehegan’s jazz improvisation classes regularly, jammed every weekend with Larry Willis and his friends up in Harlem, did as much club‐hopping as I could when Leslie or Jean would stay with Bongi, took in a lot of movies and concerts at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall, City Center, the Palladium, Birdland, the Half Note, the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery, and Basin Street East, among others. At midterm, my trumpet, Brass Ensemble, and French grades improved. I continued to draw a blank in psychology despite the efforts of the teachers, schoolmates, and friends like the Kerinas, who all tried their best to explain the concept to me. I just could not get it. In the spring of 1961 we moved to Park West Village, a new apartment complex on the West Side. Some of the tenets were Ray Charles, Joe Zawinul, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Ray Bryant, and a host of authors, poets, designers, and visual artists. A few weeks later I finally met Harry Belafonte at his offices on 57th Street. He introduced me to his production manager, Bob Bollard, who immediately assumed developmental custody over my life. In the back of the offices was a large library with stacks of tapes, tape 341
recorders, and a large working desk. This would become my workplace for the next three years. It was the library of Harbel and Clara Music, the music‐publishing wing of Belafonte Productions. Over the years they had acquired hundreds of calypso tapes and recordings of chain‐gang music. Researchers who had visited prison work gangs in the South in the early part of the twentieth century and recorded the music had sold the latter to them. Belafonte already had a sample of this genre on a record titled Swing Dat Hammer, which his company produced. This album captured the poignant beauty of chain‐gang prisoner musicianship, the power of its militant cry for fair prisoner treatment, and the painful cries of men whose lives were filled with hopelessness. My job was to transcribe this taped music onto paper so that it could be copyrighted. I would be paid five dollars an hour, working after school. In addition to my salary, Belafonte’s foundation awarded me a stipend of $190 a month to supplement my living expenses. Belafonte was far better looking in person than the pictures of him on his countless album covers, or the movies I had seen him in, like Carmen Jones. Tall, athletic, and with golden porcelain skin and pearly white teeth, he also exuded the compassion and humility of the activist and philanthropist he was, with no pretensions of glamour or stardom. When he spoke, he looked you straight in the eye and spoke with simple eloquence. He was very unaffected—and this was at the time when he was among the most famous entertainers in the world. Most of his staff addressed him “Harry” or “Mr. B.” Even though he joked around with everyone in the office, there was no doubt he was a very focused and serious person. His impeccable taste was evident in the paintings by Charles White and other great African‐American painters that hung on the office walls, and his elegant furnishings. Harry came and left in a taxi, rushing to pick up his daughters from school after affectionately speaking with his wife, Julie, on the phone. His simple lifestyle was a pleasant surprise because I had expected a lot of flash, glitter, and fanfare around him. Instead, the people who 342
worked for him were like family. That he was able to keep such a low profile, in spite of his box‐office successes, millions of record sales, and sold‐out performances all over the world, was amazing. Over the years Harry came to be more than just a benefactor to me. He has been a father to me, the strongest influence on my stage presentation, my community activism, and my commitment to the fight for human rights. Even though it took me a long time to finally come around to it, Harry always tried very hard to teach me self‐respect, compassion for others, and, more than anything else, never to forget the people I came from. Over the weekends Leslie or Jean looked after Bongi. Although everything was going swimmingly for me, I would get terribly homesick at times, and there was still a dark cloud over my memories of home. I had lost touch with all of my Alexandra a d St. Peter’s friends. Monty and Myrtle Berman could not write because they were still under detention and now allowed any correspondence. The only person who was writing to me was my mother. She kept me abreast with as much news as it was permissible to send me. I would often go to Central Park across the street from our new flat, find a solitary area, and talk to myself in all the different home languages I could muster. On one such Sunday afternoon I was talking township slang to myself in the park, with all the choreography that comes with the territory, hands waving, torso angling to get the point just right, totally unaware that a group of people who were watching me from a distance though I had lost my mind. Concerned for my sanity, they had called a black policeman, who startled me out of my township dialogue by tapping me on the shoulder. “Hey, buddy, are you okay?” I was so taken by surprise that my heart was pounding violently against my chest. I was also scared to see a policeman. For a moment I had a flashback of South 343
African police brutality. “Sir, officer, I am quite all right. I’m from South Africa. I’ve been here for six months and have not spoken my language too much. I was talking to myself, pretending to be conversing with some of my buddies back home.” The policeman laughed. “Oh, you’re from South Africa. It’s pretty back there. You’re very fortunate to be up here in New York City, my friend. Welcome.” With those words he stuck out his hand to shake mine, told me why he had approached me, and pointed to the group of people who had alerted him to my solo performance. The cop and I walked around the park, talking about New York and South Africa, and two hours later he shook my hand in front of our building and wished me the best of luck. I never saw him again, but his friendliness did remind me how fortunate I really was to be away from South Africa, where my people were being imprisoned every day for activism—and some just for being black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Members of the liberation movements were leaving the country for Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. From there they went on to Zambia, Tanzania, West and North Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe, seeking an education and military training. Others were recruited by Cuba and China. Nelson Mandela and man of his comrades were on trial for treason. Word was that the CIA had assisted in nabbing Mandela after he had reentered South Africa from his trips all over the world, including Central Africa, where he and Oliver Tambo had established the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Among those fleeing the country or being imprisoned or murdered by agents of the evil administration were many of my friends, relatives, schoolmates, friends of my family, and people I had looked up to all my life. I was in Mrs. McLaughlin’s dictation class one morning when a bespectacled, distinguished man in his early thirties walked into the room and asked to speak to her outside. Mrs. McLaughlin came back 344
inside and said, “Masekela, your services are needed. Please take your trumpet and follow the man, he’s waiting for you outside.” Hello! I’m Al Brown,” the man said shaking my hand and smiling. “Harry sent me to come and get you. He is recording Miriam at RCA’s Webster Hall studios, and wants you to come and play some horn on a few tracks.” That afternoon, I played muted trumpet on “Strawberries,” “Umqokozo” (My Little Red Xhosa Dress), and “Ntyilo‐Ntyilo” (the Love Bird) for Miriam Makeba’s album the Many Voices of Miriam Makeba. Harry produced it, and was bursting with creative energy, enthusiasm, and jokes—clearly enjoying what he was doing. He was driving Bill Salter (bass), Archie Lee (percussionist, and Sam Brown (guitarist) to the limit. The album was a huge success and garnered major radio play, especially by Symphony Sid on his WEVD‐FM nightly program, Jumping With Symphony Sid. He targeted the three songs I played on, which transformed my rep around the city. Suddenly I was starting to command a little bit of respect, especially around the school. The young ladies were now extra‐friendly, and in the cafeteria, people were asking me how it was working with Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte. “Do you really know Dizzy?” “Have you been with Miles?” “Do you know Coltrane?” “What is Louis Armstrong like?” The questions never stopped. The people proudest of me were Miriam and Harry. They were more than convinced that they had made the right move by helping me to come to America. Ron Carter, Donald Byrd, Richard Davis, David Izenzon, Richard Williams, Herbie Hancock, Mike Abene, and all the other successful musicians who were going to the Manhattan School of Music became friendly. Ron Carter especially took a liking to me. 345
Jean Johnson had basically taken over from Leslie Reed, and had more or less moved in with us by now because Miriam was getting busier, going out more on her own tours, and beginning to perform a lot abroad in Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. With my part‐time job at Clara Music, I was finding it harder to spend as much time as I had with Bongi. She was really growing now. Her English was better than ever and she was doing well in school and was crazy about music. She was blessed with the sweetest singing voice, had natural talent for composition, and always sang new songs for me when I was at the piano. One song, “Nhlanhla,” which Bongi had named after her favorite cousin, I later recorded as an instrumental arrangement with my first band. I knew Bongi was destined to become a great musician. Astley had an aunt who lived on Manhattan Avenue in Harlem, between 112th and 113th streets. Some days I would go with him to visit Mrs. Miller. She would lay some serious Jamaican dishes on us: rice and beans, sweet plantains, jerk chicken, fish stews, and homemade ginger beer, with the meanest meat patties this side of Montego Bay. Astley suggested to me one day that I should move out of the Central Park West arrangement and get my own place. “How can you live there with all these women, man? Why don’t you take a room over at my aunt’s place? These women are stifling your shit, man. You oughta move our ass outta there and get some space, ma’fucker .” Later that spring it occurred to me that with my working after school at Clara Music and the $190‐a‐month stipend from Harry’s foundation, I could afford a small place. I took Astley’s advice and rented a room from Mrs. Miller for forty dollars a month. I can’t say Miriam was happy with my decision, but it was time for me to find my own space. What I really liked about my new place was that I could practice my scales and then play some of Clifford’s, Miles’s, 346
and Dizzy’s licks. A drunken tenant from across the alley would be my audience. “Blow dat horn, ma’fucker, blow dat ma’fucking horn. You one soulful nigger. Blow dat horn, ma’fucker!” he’d yell out to my dicey new neighborhood, which was teeming with heroin junkies, pimps and prostitutes, numbers runners and drug dealers. Around this time a new influx of South African exiles began migrating to the Northeast and Mid‐Atlantic United States. Miriam and I were overjoyed about this addition to our growing South African community. She really enjoyed for all of us to come over for dinner, have drinks and bury ourselves in nostalgia, and end the night singing songs from home, followed by a grand finale with Bongi, Miriam, and me singing the traditional ethnic chants. Miriam was the toast of New York’s African community, and America in general was fascinated by her charm and seeming simplicity, as well as her exotic looks, magical voice, and overwhelming personality. Miriam, Mburumba, and Jane introduced me to people from all over the world. Miriam had performed at John Kennedy’s inauguration, at the opening of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, at Carnegie Hall, at the Hollywood Bowl, an din almost every prestigious arena, forum, night club, amphitheater, auditorium, and stadium in the world. Even more amazing was the fact that all this had occurred over less than two years. Although Mrs. Miller was warm and motherly and treated me like a son, she did not allow me to have female company in my room. I was beginning to feel caged in. After a few months I went looking for places to rent below Harlem, but was always rejected for any number of reasons. I was a foreigner. I didn’t have full‐time employment. I was a student. I soon figured out that the problem was the color of my skin. 347
One afternoon I walked up 57th Street with Belafonte to the Russian Tea Room, where we had lunch with his guitarist Ernie Calabria, Diahann Carroll, Anthony Quinn, and Sidney Poitier. Harry had wanted to host an evening of poetry reading at his home—nothing elegant, just an artistic, creative, fun‐filled evening with his close friends and musical accompaniment by Ernie, John Cartwright, and me. Walking back to his office, I told Belafonte about my problem finding an apartment. He turned me on to Millard Thomas, his other guitarist, who lived at 310 West 87th Street, between West End Avenue and riverside Drive, where there was indeed a one‐bedroom flat for rent on the ground floor. The proprietor, who lived on the floor above, was Mrs. Edith Marzani, a radical socialist who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts. She liked me right on the spot and told me to move in as soon as I wanted. She was in a wheelchair, having been paralyzed from the waist down, but her spirit was dynamic. Mrs. Miller was sad that I was leaving. She liked my midnight horn serenades. I would miss her wonderful cooking and motherly care. “Be sure to come and visit me, you hear?” she said, misty‐eyed. I took off from school the next day and bought a bed and other household goods from the Salvation Army. I painted the apartment walls flat white and the window frames glossy black. Miriam gave me some sheets, pillowcases, a bedspread, and a few kitchen items. That Friday night I slept in the first bed I had every owned in my life. I got a telephone and regularly spoke with Sonny and Pat in London. Pat told me she’d be coming to New York to spend a few weeks with me before continuing on to Barbados. Sonny had secretly warned me that Pat had been living part‐time with Ben “Satch” Masinga, who was in the cast of King Kong, which was now a bit hit in the West End. Although we had been apart for almost a year and I also had had my fair share of dalliances, still I felt betrayed, mainly because Satch was an old friend from African Jazz and Variety days. 348
However, Pat had a very logical explanation—she described their relationship as purely biological. The tables were turned. Still, we had a very enjoyable two weeks together. I took her to see Miles, Belafonte, Dizzy, Miriam, and a Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald concert at Carnegie Hall. We also had a few dinners at Miriam’s, and when we left her place, Pat brought up an old subject again. “Hughie, she still loves you,” Pat said. “Remember what I told you before? I’m a woman. I can tell.” “It can’t be anymore, Pat, come on,” I replied. “Since I’ve been in the States, Miriams’s been having affairs with Pernell Roberts, Horace Silver, Max Zollner, a West African diplomat, and Kenneth Dadzie, a United Nations officer, all of whom she has introduced to me as her lovers. That is ample proof that she’s gotten over me a long time ago.” “On the contrary, Hughie,” Pat continued. “She’s doing all of this to make you jealous. Can’t you see?” My head was swimming in confusion as our cab meandered back to my apartment. I was over Miriam and she was over me. She had her lovers and I had mine. I had just lived with her for more than six months and wed never spent a night together. What was Pat tripping about? If there was anyone I had strong feelings for, it was Pat. Regardless of Satch, I was still madly in love with her. Belafonte saw that I was crazy about her, and thought at was the ideal person for me. “Why don’t you marry her, Hughie?” Harry’s question had gone over my head at the time, but checking out Pat staring out the taxi window, I began wondering if I should seize the moment. 349
One night Pat and I had just returned from a movie when the phone rang. It was Millard, asking me to come upstairs for a minute. As soon as I walked in, Millard put five fat marijuana joints in my shirt pocket, lit the one he was holding, and said, “I know you are accustomed to only the best where you come from. All along I didn’t want to waste your time with the bullshit smoke I been holding. Last night a friend of mine scored me a couple of ounces of Panama Red, the connoisseur’s smoke. I know you’ll love this, Hughie,” he said. Without waiting for an answer from me, he passed me the joint and I proceeded to savage it, passing it back to him from time to time. When the joint was finished, Millard said, “Hurry back to your lady, man. I know you’re gonna enjoy yourselves tonight.” He wasn’t lying. Pat and I made torrid love until morning. I asked her to marry me a few times during the course of the night, but she just giggled and kissed me all over my face. I passed out until midmorning, when Pat asked if I was ready to get up and eat some breakfast. She was weeping. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Nothing,” she replied. I’m just sad because I’m leaving in a few days and we are having such a wonderful time together. Shit, man, go and wash so we can eat.” It was a beautiful summer Sunday morning. I suggested that we take a stroll through Central Park. Again, Pat started crying. “What’s the matter, baby?” I asked. “Hughie, I want to marry you so badly,” Pat began, “but my parents will not hear of it. I have already asked the, but they say I can’t marry some musician who has no future to talk about. My father is the head of Barbado’s hospital system and the medical association, and all my siblings and cousins are doctors, lawyers, bankers, judges, and ministers of state. I am expected to marry into such a family, and they refuse to listen to why I want to be with you. I just don’t have the strength to go against the grain, Hughie.” 350
A few days later we took a taxi to the airport. We said very little during the ride. This time there were no tears when we said our good‐byes. We both knew that we most probably would never see each other again. Back at the office a few days later, Belafonte asked me about Pat. I told him she had left for Barbados. “You should go fetch her back, man. You’ll never find another one like her,” he said. “Not for a long time.” He was right. During the summer of 1961, Miriam and Bongi left for an extended tour of Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. With school out, I worked full time at Clara Music and kept up my private horn lessons with Cecil Collins at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey. Bob Bollard thought I was doing so well that he recommended me to Hugo Montenegro, Belafonte’s new music director. At the time, Hugo was arranging orchestral music for Harry’s upcoming summer tour, which would include a large dance troupe selected by the great choreographer Walter Nicks. Among the dancers and choreographers, Pearl Reynolds. Hugo hired me to notate Nick’s dance sequences as a guide for him to translate them into an orchestral score for the concert tour. For me, this was the biggest challenge I’d faced since King Kong. I managed to pull the task off over three days and became good friends with the dance company, especially Pear. Hugo Montenegro was so impressed with my work that he proposed I work with him as his orchestrator. Around this time I met Valentine Pringle at the Belafonte office. He was Harry’s new protégé. A tall, ebony‐complexioned, bass‐baritone singer with a voice very much like Paul Robeson’s, his spirituals and folk songs made him popular on the club and concert circuits. Val’s guitar player was Bruce Langhorne, a curly haired, light‐skinned musician with a delightful sense of humor. The three of us hit it off hard and started hanging out at my apartment, where we would 351
listen to music, drink a lot of cognac, and laugh our asses off. Sometimes we hung out at Bruce’s apartment on 48th Street, where he lived with Georgia, his dancer wife, who was a product of the Katherine Durham dance ensemble and a close friend of Pearl Reynolds. Although Bruce worked with Val from time to time, his regular gig was as an accompanist for Odetta. He played on recordings for folk‐music giants like Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. One evening Pearl, who had just returned from a Belafonte tour, invited the Langhornes and me over for dinner along with Ernie Calabria, Belafonte’s guitarist, who came with his wife. Pearl was very heavy into African tradition, culture, and dance. She was also crazy about Cuban music, which she played throughout dinner, especially the Juajuanco music of Tito Rodriguez. We drank a lot of sangria wine, and then Pearl pulled out some of that Panama Red smoke, which we had with dessert. Before I knew it, I was helping Pearl wash the dishes and saying good‐bye to the guests as if I had been the host With the doors firmly locked, we sat in the candlelight, deep in discussion about African liberation, art, and dance while we graduated to some fine cognac and more Panama Red with Tito Rodriguez. This night was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship and love affair. One day Jimmy Lee, the hip trombone player from Mount Vernon, who was also in my class, invited me to a penthouse loft party where Prophet, the great artist and designer, was having a farewell party for Quincy Jones’s band, which was leaving the following day on a European tour with Dizzy Gillespie. He asked me to bring my horn because there was going to be a jam session, but there were so many gate‐crashers and musicians trying to sit in that I lost the desire to play. Instead, I enjoyed the 360‐degree view of the Manhattan skyline, Brooklyn Bridge, the Battery, the East River, and faraway New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Prophet’s wraparound 352
penthouse porch. Jimmy Lee introduced me to a tall, blond, mischievous‐looking young musician by the name of Stewart Levine. Right away Steward and I were rapping about Africa, Asia, and the rest of the world. His girlfriend, Susan Carp, was a leader of the Young Socialist Party, which is how he came to know so much about Cuba, China, South Africa, Vietnam, North Korea, Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Lumumba, and so many other elements that had become troublesome to America’s political and business establishments. During our discussions, Steward corrected me on many issues with facts that let me know he was very well read—a quality that distinguished him from most Americans, who knew nothing about matters outside their little neighborhoods except the anticommunist propaganda they got from the national media. Stewart was different. On the first day of my second year of school, Steward walked into Music Literature class and sat next to me. Right away, we sensed that we were on the way to becoming friends for life. My reputation as a musician was beginning to grow. I was getting work as a session man on recordings and club dates with the help of Al Brown. The extra money helped toward my tuition. Mrs. Marzani offered me a larger apartment on the same floor for only fifteen dollars more a month. I took it. Jimmy Lee and Steward came over to help me paint my new place. Steward asked me if I smoked grass—a question he first hit me with at Quincy’s party. He found it very odd that a musician from South Africa didn’t smoke dagga, when that country was one of the world’s biggest exporters of the herb. But I was suspicious; Millard had once been set up and busted for marijuana, and warned me to keep my habit a secret because the penalty for possession was stiff. 353
We drank vodka and orange juice while my friends helped me with the painting. Sloshed and exhausted, we finished on Sunday morning, passed out, and woke up that afternoon with painful headaches. Later, Frank St. Peter, a saxophonist friend of Jimmy and Stewart, came over and, without asking, lit up a joint and began to pass it around. It was strong Colombian smoke. I had totally forgotten my denial. “You bullshit motherfucker,” Stewart admonished. “I knew you were full of shit when you told me you didn’t smoke. I said to myself that you definitely must have been putting us on, you jiveass motherfucker. Light up another joint, Frank.” Toward the end of 1961, Belafonte thought I was ready to record my first album, especially after the success of Miriam’s last album. That night I walked to my apartment oblivious of the twelve blocks in the subfreezing temperatures; my thermal underwear and the cashmere coat Dizzy had brought me kept me warm. Inside, my soul was fired by the prospect of recording. I was very excited. Around Thanksgiving, the first wave of South African students from the PAC and ANC refugee camps in Tanzania arrived in America to attend school at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. I had been very close friends with some of them back home. At the beginning of the Christmas holiday season, Joe Louw, Willie Kgositsile, and Peter Davidson came to visit. George Molotlegi, who had been studying at Howard University in Washington, D.C., since 1959, also arrived. They all laid down their bags and made themselves at home. They had come to celebrate the festive season with me. George was a family member of the Royal Bafokeng Nation, recognized globally as one of Africa’s richest tribes. His family ruled a kingdom of more than 300,000 people spread over 750 square miles in South Africa’s Northwest Province, home to some of the richest platinum deposits in the world. 354
Schools had closed, and they had nowhere else to go for the holidays. I was the only person they knew would welcome them. At first I was worried about how my landlady would react to my boisterous guests. On the contrary, Mrs. Marzani stopped by my apartment as was her custom, greeted my friends heartily, and welcomed them to America. But the arrival of my holiday visitors didn’t go unnoticed by federal authorities. To my surprise, an unmarked car suddenly appeared and stayed parked outside my apartment building. In South Africa, I had grown used to being shadowed by the police and informers. One day I asked one of the trenchcoated men in the car why they were always parked in front of my lace. I was abruptly told, “None of your business.” I reported the matter to the police and was told they were the FBI, and that their surveillance superseded local police jurisdiction. Although this brought back memories of South Africa’s Special Branch Gestapo, we decided to ignore them. And throughout the holidays we partied openly, showing that we were not intimidated by their arrogance. My friends returned to their respective schools following the Christmas holidays, but the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and U.S. drug enforcement officials would keep an eye on me. My telephone was bugged for the next three decades that I spent in America. 355
SECTION II:
ESSAYS
356
Chapter 23
The Linguistic Revolution
By
Peter N. Raboroko
“In every form of society” writes Mr. M. Lewis, “because language is
so closely related to the thoughts. Feelings and actions of men, we
cannot change the extent, nature, functions of language without
setting in motion, further, perhaps unintended, changes.”
As a result of a number of advances of great significance to social
growth there have been changes in the extent, nature and functions of
language. The advances, which constitute historical landmarks are: r
the development of language itself, the advent of writing, the
invention of printing and the instantaneous transmission of speech
and writing. The cumulative effects of these changes have been so
great that they have initiated a new era: the era of Linguistic
Revolution. Humanity in general, and Africa in particular, is on the
threshold of this Revolution.
The spread of literacy, stimulated by, and in turn stimulating,
newspapers, cheap books and libraries, the telegraph and the cheap
postage rate: all these things have meant that people read and write
357
more. Today the written word, a commonplace commodity, spans the
world with the speed of thought.
The invention of the telephone, the radio and other communication
machines has led to a renascence of the spoken word, with
tremendous implications for human development.
The significance of these developments lies in the fact that they
transform human conduct, which process must affect thought,
feelings and impulses, as well as overt behaviour since language is
fundamental and pervasive to man as an individual and in f his social
life.
It is against a background such as the one we have delineated that we
shall examine the linguistic problems facing us.
In the previous issue Liberation [“The Problem of Many Tongues,” no.
4, August 1953], Dr. J. M. Nhlapo deals with the language question.
Dr. Nhlapo’s approach to the question, his formulation and treatment
of it show a failure on his part to grasp the essentials of the situation.
This failure emanates from his inability to appreciate the
fundamental fact that the language problem is, on both the national
and international level, a part of the social question which is the
central problem of our day, and as such cannot dealt with in
isolation.
In his approach to the problem Dr, Nhlapo quotes Sir Arthur QuillerCouch as saying: “The want of some common ‘world language’ is, I
assume, being felt by educated Europeans ever since Latin faded out
as the common language.”
We know that “educated European”, in their racial arrogance regard
a common European language, like Latin, as a “common world
language”. As a spokesman of the imperialist nations of Europe Sir
Arthur obviously conceives of the ‘world’ as the part inhabited by the
imperialist nations of Europe. Thus in his basic conception of a
‘world’ language Dr. Nhlapo is clearly in the bonds of Herrenfolk
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philosophy, according to whom ‘international’ refers to relations
between Europe or ‘civilised’ nations a euphemism for ‘exploiting
and oppressing nations.’
In his approach Dr. Nhlapo further states that “Linguistic barriers do
not only constitute an international but an intertribal problem.” Here
again the learned doctor fails to distinguish the significant from the
trivial, the important from the unimportant, the main current of the
stream from its eddies and backwashes. To state the approach to the
problem in tribal terms is to fail to grasp the import of the working of
social forces in our midst. Tribalism as such is a decaying and
disintegrating force, and even among the indigenous peoples of
Africa it has in many parts ceased to be a force at all. The tribes and
tribalism are still with us but they have ceased to be of social force.
Thus whilst inter-tribal problems do exist they are not significant. To
speak of linguistic barriers as constituting an “intertribal problem” is
to mistake the apparent problem for the real one, to mistake the
eddies and backwashes for the main current of the stream.
Thus, in these circumstances, we cannot but reject Dr. Nhlapo’s
approach to the problem, as well as his formulation of it. Since his
treatment was based upon his formulation of the problem we need
not here concern ourselves with it. Having dug out the foundation of
his case, which was in any case embedded in the bed-rock of shifting
sand, we need hardly bother about the walls, which were bound to
crumble and tumble to Mother Earth. Our task is to seek a bedrock of
concrete in which to embed the foundations of our problem.
The idea of a common language for all humanity is an ideal which
cannot receive practical application for many years to come. An
international language, to be functionally effective, must aim at
making the various nations of the world, and not only their leaders,
effective members of one world. However, within the foreseeable
future, national languages will be used for satisfying the immediate
needs of the members of various nations.
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The urgent problem which we shall soon have to face practically is
that of a common language for Africa.
We have already indicated that tribalism is a dying social force in
Africa. African nationalism, an emergent and growing factor, is once
again set in motion forces that radically affected the internal economy
as well as the social life of the African people. It is worth while noting
that this new industrial capital was largely built the new, significant
social force in Africa. The existence of a nationalism presupposes the
existence of a nation. A nation is an historically evolved stable
community of people arising on the basis of a community language
of a territory of economic life, of social institutions and of behaviour
patterns.
Before the advent of colonialism Africa, like India and Indonesia,
was, despite the fact of its physical compactness, a mere geographical
expression. From the seventeenth century the rising commercial
capital of Europe set in motion forces that affected the internal
economy and the social life of the indigenous people of Africa.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the new industrial
capital of Europe through the African people, who, during the rise of
European commercial capital in the earlier period, had been forcibly
removed from Africa and exploited in the slave trade and as a labour
force.
Contrary to popular notions on the subject, it is not essential that a
nation should evolve out of a community of tribal or even racial
affiliations. Both the British and the American nations which have
evolved out of the combination and amalgamation of different tribes
and different races, are a living negation of this popular fallacy. The
African nation is thus founded on the broad basis of people deriving
their origin from different tribes and different races. Thus the
conception, “birth and growth of a nation” presupposes the
disintegration of tribes and races and their neutralization as a social
force. The theory of “the blood” as the basis of such a nation is
incompatible with the facts. Such a theory falsely implies that this
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nation is inherently capable of accommodating people of other
national or racial origins.
Through factors of imperialism, which have stunted the national
growth of this nation, the creation of common social institutions
consonant with the being and social development of this nation has
been prevented. Already, however, there is in existence a movement
historically destined to create the appropriate social institutions. Thus
at a higher stage of development the existence of such institutions is
bound to become a reality.
The question of a national language, the outward and visible sign of
mature nationhood, is being resolved by forces mightier than
ourselves. In this regard, we already see in the social forces at work
the “first faint stirring of future promise.”
The community of behaviour patterns which we have alluded to as
one of the ingredients of nationhood is in part the product of
historical evolution and in part that of a conscious social philosophy.
Through the medium of a common language the process of
integrating the feelings, attitudes, thoughts, impulses and actions of a
people will be functionally extended and accelerated.
It is in the light of this approach that Africa’s linguistic problem must
be viewed and examined.
Before examining in detail the question of a national language for
Africa let us examine the experience of some other nations.
In Great Britain, the Midland dialect of England, mainly on account
of its geographical situation, became the accepted standard English
and consequently the national language of Great Britain. Here we
must not forget that both Ireland and Wales, on account of their
previous repression by the English, ultimately rejected English as
their mother tongue.
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In 1944 the British Government decided to promote the use of Basic
English as an international auxiliary language within the
Commonwealth as well as beyond.
In India, where English had acquired a special function of intercommunication during the British occupation, Hindi has by statute
been adopted as the national language and is expected within fifteen
years to become the first language of India.
In the United States, English was the language of the pioneers.
Within the U. S. A. there are large communities speaking, reading
and writing the languages of their original homes in Europe. As a
result of this there is a great deal of functional illiteracy in English. In
the words of Mr. Lewis “it is only in the presence of a common
language functionally effective in thought, feeling and action that it is
possible for the U. S. A. to be an integrated society in the fact of
military, economic, political and social needs.”
At the Revolution, when the inception of the Soviet Union took place,
an attempt was made to establish Russian as the one language for the
constituent republics. When the various people showed the usual
resistance, this policy was changed. Although Russian was rejected as
a first language it was readily accepted as a second language and
serves the purpose of a common means of intercommunication. All
the Republics in which Russian was not already the vernacular
decided in 1920 to make it a compulsory second language in their
secondary schools.
The serious linguistic problem facing the Soviet Union is how to
achieve adult functional literacy in this one common language.
When, in another generation or two, the vast majority of Soviet
citizens begin to use Russian for their immediate needs it will
automatically become their mother tongue.
There has for centuries been a common written language throughout
China but no common spoken language. On this question S. S.
Karlgren remarks “an edict issued in Peking can be read and
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understood everywhere in this vast country, but the Cantonese read
it aloud in a way that sounds utter nonsense to the Pekingese.” In an
attempt to correct this defect the Chinese government officially
adopted a common script in 1918 and embodied this in a common
national dictionary. As the traditional written language of China was
too scholarly, a kind of Basic Chinese has been evolved to encourage
the growth of literacy.
In all the national politics we studied, the problem has been one of a
single common language which every member of the society can
speak, read and write.
The immediate approach to the solution of this problem has been the
adoption of bilingualism which allows the adult the use of his own
mother tongue for the satisfaction of his immediate needs and desires
and of a second language for his effective membership of the larger
society.
The problem of encouraging literacy has also led to the simplification
of both the spoken and the written language. The movement in each
case is towards the achievement of functional efficacy in speech and
writing in the common language and the consequent facilitation of
the integration of feelings, thoughts and actions.
Having seen how the problem of a common language presents itself
to various national polities we may now ask in what form the
problem presents itself to Africa. For Africa, the problem is the
adoption of a common language that will make the people of Africa
functionally effective members of the African Nation and that will at
a later stage satisfy their immediate needs and desires.
With the problem thus stated, it becomes clear that such a language
must first be regarded as an auxiliary language to serve the intercommunication needs of the people’s of Africa who at present speak
languages that are unintelligible to one another. It means also that at
a later stage when such a language is used by various people for the
satisfaction of their immediate needs and desires, it will have become
363
their Mother tongue. When such a language acquires functional
efficacy in speech and literacy for the adult members of the African
community it will then be firmly entrenched as a national language.
Which language should be chosen as an auxiliary? It might be
tempting to advance the claims of one’s own sectional or regional
dialect. Or it might sound plausibly “objective” to advance the claims
of French or English, Portuguese or even Afrikaans, as being widely
understood in different parts. Such approaches, however, are
basically invalid, because they ignore the real social forces at work in
Africa. It would repay us better to study and analyse the social forces
at work in our continent.
Unlike India, which enjoyed the doubtful honour of being under one
oppressor power, Africa enjoys the unenviable honour of having five
or six oppressor powers. Although the essential nature of the
oppression is strikingly the same, the methods and approaches to the
achievement of the task of oppression sometimes differ radically and
even fundamentally.
Under the Portuguese policy of “assimilation” the educational
curricula have no reference to the child’s own mother tongue. In this
way, a happy few Africans are “assimilated” into the oppressor class
and are, through neglect of their mother tongue, successfully
estranged from the mass of their people.
Under the South African policy of segregation the educational
curriculum gives the African a smattering of his mother tongue, and
then burdens him with the task of learning two of his master’s
languages on the explicit understanding that he becomes a more
efficient tool.
Under the Belgian policy of “integration” the African child is now
permitted the luxury of the vernacular for purposes of
intercommunication with his “black brethren,” and Swahili has been
picked for the purpose. Those who became successfully “integrated”
into the ruling caste may not only help in exploiting their black
364
brethren but may also get into white hotels and travel in white trains
without their less fortunate black mothers, black fathers or black
sweethearts.
Under the British policy of “partnership” the problem of intertribal
communication has imposed the necessity of using Swahili for
mother tongue instruction in Zanzibar, Tanganyika, Kenya and
Uganda.
The logic of circumstances has already forced different oppressor
powers to foster the teaching of the same vernacular in different
zones. The same factor has forced one oppressor, Great Britain, to
foster the spread and teaching of this same vernacular.
The spread of Swahili is extending northwards and southwards
beyond the confines of the areas mentioned. A number of leading
Universities of the world, like the University of Leningrad, have
provided a professorial chair for the teaching of Swahili. It has been
classed by language scholars as the ninth important language of the
world.
In Europe there are no Europeans. There are only Frenchmen and
Germans and Swedes. In Africa there are no Nigerians, Ugandans
and South Africans---there are only Africans. This emerging fast is a
pointer to the significant difference between the nationalism of
Europe and the nationalism of Africa. It is this fact that will facilitate
the spread of a “lingua franca” in Africa. On account of its
geographical situation Swahili is the most significant language in
Africa today.
Swahili belongs to the Bantu language family which includes more
than two hundred languages and dialects spoken from the Cape to
the Cameroons. Although it has unlike our local Fanakalo, retained
its essentially African grammatical structure, its c vocabulary has
borrowed much from Arabic, Galla, Somali, Portuguese and other
languages. It was set down in writing before the coming of the white
365
missionary and of the white trader. It has many dialects conditioned
by local differences.
Writing on constructed or semi-constructed languages, F. Bodmer
observes: “It is beyond human ingenuity to construct a live skylark
but the aeroplane has advantages which no flying animal possesses.
Apple trees and gooseberry bushes are also products of growth . . . .
but geneticists have produced new varieties of fruits by combining
inherited merits of different strains or allied species. The work
accomplished by pioneers of the science of language shows that it is
possible to produce new language varities by combining the inherent
merits of different forms of natural speech.”
The foregoing analysis does not imply any obligation to accept
Swahili holus-bolus, without regard to its structural defects or to the
inadequacy of its present vocabulary to the task of expressing the
scientific or philosophical concepts of our age. It may be that the
solution to the problem lies in the synthesis between its present form
and substance and new elements derived from an intelligent
approach to our society. Understood in this context, Swahili offers
the necessary question of language planning on basis for “Basic
Africanic,” an urgent necessity to enable the people of Africa to
become effective members of one society.
The proposal for the use of “Basic Africanic” as the auxiliary
language of every child in Africa, irrespective of his colour or creed,
assumes that regional languages will be retained. The use of any
language as an auxiliary presupposes the use of the child’s own
mother tongue for the satisfaction of his own immediate needs.
It would be an illusion to discuss the language question in Africa in
isolation from our major social and political problems. An all-African
medium of communication is, from our viewpoint, reasonable,
convenient and progressive. From the viewpoint of our various
rulers, however, it may seem subversive and dangerous. They would
prefer to perpetuate tribal linguistic and other divisions, and instruct
us in European languages only to the extent that would enable us to
366
receive our orders and report on their execution. Therefore the
language question in Africa can only be seen properly as one aspect
of our struggle for emancipation from white imperialism.
At the same time, that national struggle itself will be the poorer if it
overlooks the importance and the dynamic character of the language
question. It is a primary requirement for us to grasp the leading
principles pf the language question. We must free our minds from
the assumption that the imperialist powers, and the sheltered
position of their languages, have some to stay permanently in Africa.
We must study and discuss linguistic problems; popularize the idea
of a common language; examine different points of view [regarding]
the language problems of different countries; and the idea of an
international language.
The language question must be taken up as part of the national
liberation movement.
Chapter 24
European and Asian Diary
by
Ruth First
367
26th MAY [1954]
Here and there in [East] Berlin, one can see what the bombed city
must have looked like. All rubble is cleared away or stacked in tidy
heaps, but gaping shells of some buildings remain. Some impressive
building has been going on. The Stalin Allee is the city’s pride and
rightly so. It stretches for some miles, a wide open boulevard and
lining both its sides are enormous apartment houses. The thousands
of flats here have been allocated to the best shock workers. Names
were put in a lottery for allocation to some of the people who, by
giving three per cent, of their earnings per year, helped to find the
money to build the flats.
The World Peace Council Meeting---a really great meeting. There
were about 500 participants among them, names known throughout
the world. Pritt opened the session. Then there was Kuo Mo Jo,
Sartre, Anna Sehgers, Shostakovitch, Lafitte and thousands of other
celebrities, as thick as bees. There were plenary sessions in the
morning and commissions in the afternoon. The two main items on
the agenda were the H-bomb and national independence. The whole
meeting is a masterpiece of organisation. There is an army of
interpreters and translators and a smoothly working system of
simultaneous translations through head microphones.
The Indian delegation is big and very representative. Mulk Raj
Anand is among them. He is a small man with a sharp sense of
humour. He was using his every free moment in organizing an
exhibition of contemporary Indian art to tour Europe. Sitting next to
me are Desmond Buckle and Gordon Schaeffer. A little man with
only half of his left arm---chirpy and full of go. The Indian delegate
who spoke yesterday got a tremendous reception, especially when
the Chinese and Soviet delegates went up to shake his hand after the
speech. Kuo Mu Jo seems to be everybody’s favourite. He has just to
giggle (and he does!) and the whole Conference roars with him.
368
The Conference went mad when it was announced that the 1953
Peace Prize had been awarded to Charlie Chaplin and he had
accepted. The other recipient was Shostakovitch, a shy, retiring man
obviously embarrassed at being fussed over.
On Thursday night we saw the Soviet ballet---the company that was
sent home from Paris in transit here for three nights. We saw
Ulanova dance in Romeo and Juliet---indescribably beautiful. Then a
potpourri of all kinds of dances---some waltzes, the Swan Lake
extract. Continuous clapping went on till our hands were almost
blistered. That’s one thing we’ve been doing a great deal of---clap.
But of course in the last week there’s been a lot to clap.
1st JUNE
This week end the Conference of the Free German Youth will take
place. It promises to be very impressive. Already contingents of
young people have been marching up and down the streets outside
the hotel.
I did a short broadcast this morning on South Africa over the German
Radio.
Berlin is a real Conference city. Last week the Peace Council, this
week the Youth Whitsun Festival; next week something else. And all
entails tremendous organization. A fleet of cars, whole hotels placed
at the disposal of delegates; each one receiving not only a guide, and
a special Conference briefcase, but even 50 marks of pocket money!
I went over into West Berlin the other night. It was like two countries,
two cities. The outside appearances are completely different. One
cannot drive from the West into the East without a visa and all the
paraphernalia, but all one has to do is go into the underground
railway and over you go. The lights go out for a few seconds as you
cross the border from East to West and the other way, but that is all
that happens.
369
West Berlin is like a corner of London or Vienna. Luxurious flats,
well-dressed people---but 300,000 unemployed in a population of 2
million. And the relatively high standard of living of the rest only
because of the enormous amount of American aid.
In the East, not this superficial atmosphere of luxury but signs of the
steady improvement of living conditions, magnificent workers’
apartment houses are a sign of the future.
3rd June
This is not a Conference of the Free German Youth but a week-long
Festival of sport, culture and parades. Berlin has changed hands. The
youth have taken over. This morning trainloads of young people
have been pouring in. Two and a half thousand foreign guests are
coming. Altogether 700,000 youth will take part. The Free German
Youth has a membership of 3 million in the German Democratic
Republic. Imagine a march past with almost the entire population of
Johannesburg taking part.
There are several international football matches, athletics, ballet,
opera and a Soviet Folk Dance group, puppet shoes and lots more.
Tomorrow we visit Stalingrad---a completely new city not on the old
maps which has gigantic iron foundries. On Monday we plan a visit
to Potsdam, in between we’ll take part in the youth festival.
This afternoon a few of us visited the Pioneer Republic for children of
six to fourteen; adults of over 25 are not admitted unless
accompanied by a child! It takes two and a half hours to walk round
the Republic which is beautifully wooded and has an artificial sea
with sand brought to its banks by train; tents and camping facilities
which ordinarily house 3,000 pioneers at a time but which this week
are housing 30,000 participants in the Festival; an open-air theatre
which will be officially opened tomorrow by the G. D. R. [German
Democratic Republic] Premier---Pieck; sports fields and athletic
tracks, sleighing rinks and a toboggah slope, puppet theatres, a morse
370
station for the children---we got tired of walking around so gave up
at this stage. I think this is the most exciting thing I have seen in
Germany up to now. Every ten pioneers have a leader or Free
German Youth instructor with them and this enormous park teems
with files of children, singing, dancing and walking from one part to
another. Their singing would delight you---especially some of the
German international brigade songs.
Yesterday we went to Dresden and Leipzig. Eleven Nigerian students
are studying at these universities on scholarships given by the Free
German Youth and supervised by the German Trade unions.
Two young students are acting as guides and interpreters. Both are
very interested in what goes on in the world, South Africa included.
One asked intelligent questions about South Africa and seemed to
grasp the situation and remarked how complex it was. But in the next
breath he revealed that he thought Malan [white Prime Minister] was
a black man! I can now understand how complex South Africa did
seem to him.
Everywhere there are many newly published books in German being
sold. Their publishing is not only prolific but od a fine standard. If
only one could get in English some of the works I have seen in
German. I am thinking mainly of the proletarian poetry, novels of
such people as [Jorge] Amardo, Zimmering, Neruda and scores of
others.
7th June
The German Youth’s festival has now been going on since Friday but
yesterday, Sunday was the official opening.
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Chapter 25
The Meaning of Bantu Education
by
Duma Nokwe Bantu education is the ‘education’ designed for the ‘Bantu’ by the Nationalist Government; it is a development of ‘Native Education,’ the education which was designed for the ‘Native; of South Africa. Like ‘Native Education,’ ‘Bantu education’ is a qualified education which is a product of the political and economic structure of the country. Like its predecessors too, ‘Bantu education’ was not introduced as a means of raising the cultural level of the Africans, nor of developing the abilities of the African child to the full, but as one of the devices which aim at solving the cheap labour problems of the country. The development of education amongst the Africans and the policy of Governments have been closely connected with the labour problems of the country. 372
Dr. Verwoerd’s statement that “(Native) education in each of the four provinces, therefore, took into account neither the community interests of the Bantu, nor the general policy of the country,” is incorrect in so far as it refers to the general policy of the country. It is, of course, correct that ‘Native Education’ did not take into account the interests of the Africans, it was never intended to fulfill that task. The Director of Education of the Transvaal made it very clear that “teach the Native to work” was the “true principle by which the education of the Native is to be regulated and controlled” and that a plan for “native education” must “contemplate the ultimate social place of the native as an efficient worker.” The report continues to prescribe a scheme through which the aims of Native education could be realized, and the scheme which had to be for the continuation of MANUAL TRAINING with ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION, and in the second place for the shaping of the elementary instruction to equip the Native for more intelligent comprehension of any industrial work before him.” The scheme was implemented; and it determined the salient features of Native education, which were: 1) The complete application of segregation in the purpose, administration and organization of education. 2) The vesting of control of education of the Africans in hands which were not responsible to the Africans, despite the fact that Africans were made to pay for their education. 3) The careful regulation of the number of children who had access to education to keep it as low as possible, so as not to upset the reservoir of cheap, unskilled labour. Among of the ‘controls’ used were the denial of free, compulsory education to Africans and the insistence that parents who wanted their children “educated” should pay for them, and the inadequate and poor schooling provided for Africans. 4) The careful regulation of the curriculum of African schools so that African education remained basically elementary with an emphasis on MANUAL labour. This is illustrated by the following extract from 373
the report of the Native Education Commission of 1930‐1932 (p. 75), “The students were taught gardening, other manual work, every student at Lovedale had to work two hours in the garden or on the road, this excellent practice continues to this day.” 5) The denial of technical education to Africans, and the restriction of their training to teaching, nursing and interpreters and priests. The government attempted to check the flow to towns by imposing restrictions on the movements of Africans, in the form of permits under the Native Urban Areas Act of 1935. But as industry developed, the contradiction sharpened proportionately. Successive governments of the country have tried various devices to resolve the contradiction between country and town. The Amendment to the Urban Areas Act was calculated to tighten restrictions on the entry of Africans into towns; elaborate influx control departments were established, the police force was increased, and pass raids were intensified; and arrested Africans found themselves working o the farms. Farmers were allowed to build farm goals and secure their cheap labour behind bars. The Nationalist Government, which represents the interests of the capitalist farmers and the mine magnates, has intensified the efforts to drive Africans from the towns to the country in a more ruthless manner. ‘BANTU EDUCATION’ is one of these numerous efforts of the Nationalists, aimed at resolving the conflict between the farms and mines on the one hand, and industry and commerce on the other, by compelling the African to accept the miserable oppressive conditions of work on the farms and mines. ‘Native education’ was the ‘education’ imposed upon the African during the period of the development of capitalism in the towns; the period when there was a shortage of cheap labour in towns and consequently a great demand for it. ‘Bantu education’ is imposed on the Africans in the period of the development of capitalism in the 374
country, a period of intensified exploitation by farmers and the shortage of cheap labour on farms and mines. Through it, the Nationalists are attempting to harness the African to the most ruthless exploitation and oppression. BENEFICIAL—TO WHOM? Dr. Verwoerd’s exposition of Bantu education contains the outwork fallacy that it is intended to benefit the African. In his pamphlet on Bantu Education, he says: “The Bantu pupil must obtain knowledge, skills and attitudes in the school which will be useful and advantageous to him, at the same time beneficial to his community. The subject matter must be presented to him in such a way that he can understand and master it, easily making it his own, to the benefit and services of his community.” In the very next paragraph, however, Dr. Verwoerd proceeds to expose this fallacy by stating that: “A school must equip him to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa impose upon him.” He admits that the country maintained the difference in standards between European and African to perpetuate the illusion of white supremacy and black inferiority, the fallacy upon which the exploiters rely to justify their ruthless exploitation of the people. Native education fulfilled the function of supplying the growing commercial enterprises and mines with ‘efficient’ workers without disturbing the cheap labour reservoir. Native education was the ‘educational’ scheme for Africans during the period of the shortage of labour in the mines and the growing 375
commercial enterprises of the country; together with other measures like the Land Act of 1913 and the Taxation laws, it maintained a steady flow of cheap labour from the country to the towns. Before World War I, when South Africa had mainly an agricultural‐
mineral economy, most of the energies of the government were spent in squeezing Africans out of the Reserves and driving them to the towns. With the development of industry in the towns after the First World War, the process which the Governments had begun assumed inconvenient proportions as the flow from country to town increased. This created two ‘problems’ for the economy of the country: a. The participation of the African in industry and his low wage constituted a ‘threat’ to the privileged position of the European worker, according to the Report of the Economic Commission (p. 76): “Industry in the Union in areas where the Native predominates used to be based almost entirely on “European supervision and skilled work, and Native manual labour. This was the natural division of labour in the earlier period of the contact between races….when however, the land began to fill up and the struggle for a share in the material goods became keener, this division of labour began to change. On the one hand, there arose a small but increasing number of natives who aspired to the more lucrative occupations of the Europeans. To remedy this position, and to restore the ‘natural division of labour’ which protected the European, Colour Bar laws were passed which denied Africans access to skilled labour, the ‘natural’ preserve of the European. b. Africans were naturally attracted by the more favourable conditions of work offered by the growing industries, as opposed to 376
the feudal conditions on the farms and the exploitation of the mines. This created a condition of surplus cheap labour in the towns and a ‘shortage’ of labour in the country and on the mines, thus sharpening the contradiction between the town and the country. “The economic structure of our country of course results in large numbers of natives having to earn their living in the service of Europeans.” These last two quotations represent a more honest declaration of the purpose of Native education. Dr. Verwoerd’s exposition of ‘Bantu Education’ is full of glaring contradictions, but in characteristic Nationalist style he staggers blindly over the contradictions and imposes upon the majority of the people of South Africa a complete racialist and fascist system of ‘education.’ It is a negation of every single principle of education, which has been accepted by democratic people of the world. The content of ‘Bantu education’ is a gross lowering of the already low education facilities of the Africans. Dr. Verwoerd shamelessly sets Standard II as ‘fundamental’ education, after which pupils will be carefully selected for what is called high primary education. Dr. Verwoerd keeps a judicious silence about the fate of those who are not selected for the higher primary course. The curriculum is distorted. Fundamental education consists of reading, writing and arithmetic, Afrikaans and English, religious education and singing. History and geography have been excluded. The intention is obvious, the African child who is being prepared as an instrument of cheap labour in a society which relies on fallacies must not know either the conditions of his country nor the truth about the world which are apparent even in the distorted. Some African history books are likely to expose the fallacies. 377
Dr. Verwoerd blames the African child for the low percentage of African children who have access to education, and not completely inadequate schooling facilities. To increase the percentage, he proposes, first, to reduce school hours of the substandard to three a day. . . . “it is wrong to utilize expensive teaching to supervise large classes of bored pupils while thousands of children who are entitled to the same measure of primary education kept out of school.” Secondly, to remove children who keep in sub‐standards for years, “keeping other children out of the available school accommodation and wasting public funds without themselves deriving any benefit worth mentioning.” Thirdly, to dismiss children who fail to attend school regularly. Fourthly, to refuse admission to children who cannot afford school requisites, such as pens and exercise books. These proposals are made under the heading of “Extension of School Facilities for Bantu Children.” He does not mention a word about building new schools. On this point, however, he proposes later on: a. “Bantu mothers can, in accordance with local methods, erect walls where farmers allow it, and the Department will provide the windows, doors and roofs.” b. “The present arrangement in Native Areas by which the Department provides the necessary labour is sound and can continue. The urban Bantu community will have to meet its obligations just as the rural community has to do.” The net result of these proposals is a reduction in the educational facilities for Africans. 378
The intensification of oppression and exploitation is extended to the teachers. Women teachers who are less expensive than men will be preferred. Instead of an increase in wages which teachers have been clamouring and hoping for, Dr. Verwoerd proposes a reduction in the present scales, despite the fact that European teachers have had increases and cost of living continues to rise. Dr. Verwoerd argues that the European teacher has a higher salary because “he is in the service of the European community and his salary must be fixed accordingly.” He ingeniously explains that the European teacher in the service of Africans gets a European wage because he can be regarded as on loan to the African. Dr. Verwoerd does not explain why he does not apply his principles to the messengers and the “large numbers of natives who earn their living in the service of the Europeans.” Dr. Verwoerd says of African teachers that they are entrusted with “a role in which they will be in the service of and responsible to the “Bantu community.” At the beginning of his pamphlet, however, he says “the control of the educational system has been taken out of the hands of the Provinces and placed in the hands of the Department of Native Affairs,” and later he says “no new school may, however, be established without the prior approval of the Department.” The only responsibility the African community has in Bantu education is that of providing the children and the schools. The introduction of ‘mother‐tongue’ education as a medium for teaching is justifiable on two ground: first as an expression of respect for a people and its national culture; secondly as a step towards the democratization of education amongst a people. The facts about Bantu education and numerous oppressive laws of the Nationalists indicate clearly that Dr. Verwoerd has no respect for the Africans and in fact despises them, nor has he any intention of democratizing education so that it is available to all Africans to 379
develop their abilities to the full, and so that they can contribute freely and fully to raising of the material and cultural standards of all people of this country. The reasons why Dr. Verwoerd introduces mother‐tongue instruction is to enable the African child to master his distorted schemes easily, and to fan the spirit of tribalism to divide the African people. “Bantu education” is a reactionary scheme which very nearly destroys education for the African in South Africa. It is reactionary because it is designed to satisfy the needs of a reactionary and heartless class of exploiters. Whilst the Nationalists disregard the needs and interests of the masses of the people, and subject the people to a more ruthless oppression and exploitation in the interests of solving the contradictions of their society they do not take into account the sharpening conflict they are creating between themselves and the people, which will ultimately break their artificial political and economic structure. II Bantu Education in Action When Bantu Education was introduced, Dr. Verwoerd wrapped it up in apparently ‘progressive principles.’ These were firstly the separation of education to the state. Secondly,, there was the much boosted extension of the control of education directly to the African people through School Committees. Thirdly, the introduction of mother tongue instruction. It was not difficult to strip Dr. Verwoerd’s schemes of the appearance of progressiveness and to expose Bantu education for what it is—a treacherous attempt to destroy the critical and creative abilities of the African people, and to restrict their ambitions within the narrow confines which the Nationalists design and desire should be the functions of the members of the Bantu 380
Society. The publication of syllabuses for the Lower Primary Course and the Higher Primary Course have confirmed the predictions of the people as to the true purpose of Bantu education. The New Syllabus In both cases, Dr. H.F. Verwoerd has invited criticism of the syllabuses and he contends that they are unassailable from the point of view of modern progressive educational principles. But Dr. Verwoerd has no regard for the criticism, if he had, he would long have abandoned his post and his Party. These invitations for criticism are intended to shield the ruthless autocracy with which the Nationalists implement their schemes. The Nationalists hate criticism and are determined to punish severely the volume of protest and criticism against the very introduction of Bantu Education met with the most scathing retorts and contemptuous dismissal in government circles. Teachers who will in the main be responsible for the implementation of Bantu education have been forbidden from criticizing the policy of the Native Affairs Department, and whoever criticizes the syllabus adversely will be a marked man. No amount of criticism, therefore, will persuade the Nationalists to modify or abandon their plans. There was a mixed reaction to the Syllabuses, as there was to the introduction of Bantu Education. Some people (fortunately only a small and relatively uninfluential section of the people) adopted the attitude that there was no fundamental change which had been introduced by Bantu Education. Native education, they argued, was as much an education created by the ruling class for the oppressed people as Bantu Education was. It was further argued that whatever dangerous innovations there might be in Bantu Education, these could be remedied by raising the political consciousness of the teachers so that they teach that which would liberate the children rather than what would enslave them mentally. Another group 381
(consisting mainly of teachers), which whilst admitting the destructive nature of Bantu Education, regarded it as an insult to suggest that teachers could willingly inject poison into their own children. Before assessing the role of the African teacher in Bantu Education, it is necessary to examine some aspects of the syllabus for the Higher Primary Course (Std. III to Std. VI). The medium of instruction throughout the whole course is vernacular, except in the case of English and Afrikaans. The following are the subjects and the time allocated to each is indicated in brackets in minutes per week: Religious instruction (100), Afrikaans (205), English (205), Arithmetic (180), Social Studies (180), Health Education (150), Nature Study (60), Singing and games (60, Needlework (for girls), Tree planting and soil conservation, Handwork and Homecraft, and Gardening for Boys and Girls (each 120). It should be noted that out of a total of 1,650 min. per week, 360 minutes or nearly a quarter of the time be spent in handwork, gardening or tree planting and soil conservation. In addition, the Nature Study course provides for practical work for all classes which includes the ‘collection of weeds’ and this resembles Dickens’ ‘So‐the‐
Boys School.’ In the words of the syllabus, the primary aim is to inculcate the attitude that “work ennobles.” The moral and mental training of the child is provided by a subject called Social Studies. This is really a training in Nationalist policy under the guise of Geography, History, Citizenship and Good Conduct. There is no clearer statement of the purpose of this course than that contained in the syllabus itself. These subjects have been” orientated economically and socially with an aim to develop in the Bantu child Social consciousness and responsibility.” The course is intended to make the child realize that he is bound by various ties to particular groups of people as they are represented in his home and in his tribe. Groups of people beyond his tribe are omitted, 382
apparently it is undesirable that he should realize the bonds with people beyond his tribe. A further aim is: “The acceptance by the Bantu Child in an intelligent manner of the fact that the welfare of his community depends on the contribution made towards it by each of its members. He should therefore know how his own people work and others earn a living. . . . and he should be convinced that he must work if he wishes to lead a useful and contented life. . . He must realize that by his behaviour other people will determine whether society will accept him as a dependable and useful person. . . He should be convinced that he cannot live and act as a detached individual in society. Furthermore, he must realize that the laws are necessary for the people of any community for harmonious living together. Consequently, teaching should lead the child to do naturally, and therefore willingly, what society ahs prescribed as correct, good and commendable.” It would be difficult to find a clearer exposition of fascist principles of education. The passage from which these extracts have been taken represents the process of education as a task in which every effort should be made to twist and hammer an otherwise rebellious child into accepting and submitting to conditions which have been created for him. That is, of course, the basic aim of Bantu Education. The Social Studies course is therefore designed to inculcate a strong tribal consciousness, acknowledgement and acceptance of what has been prescribed for his tribe, obedience to the laws, and the function of education is to make him accept all these naturally and willingly. The orientation ahs been achieved by ruthlessly omitting everything which is inconsistent with the above purpose and including everything fashioned in Nationalist style. 383
In the section dealing with History, to indicate what a fortunate heritage awaits him, the child is taught in detail all the benevolent contributions which the State and Church have made towards the development of the Bantu. Not a word is mentioned of the contribution made by the Africans towards these institutions and towards the development of the country generally. Under Mining, Commerce and Industry, the History course includes: “the effects of Mining, Commerce and Industry on the life of the Bantu—the creation of opportunities for work; new professions and trades; movement of the people to cities; need for influx control.” No mention is made of the fact that these industries really exist by exploiting African labour. Throughout the whole course the Africans are presented as lifeless clods or earth upon whom mysterious forces are acting to shape their destiny. The action dealing with Citizenship and Good Conduct is an abomination. The whole course is designed to impress indelibly upon the child that he is a citizen not of South African but of the tribe and that he has “duties, privileges, and responsibilities in the village and the town” and ‘privilege’ instead of ‘right,’ is insistent throughout the syllabus, and sandwiched between duties and responsibilities. There is not a single occasion when the word ‘right’ is used. Quite clearly, the African child will be taught that he has no rights. Apart from an intensive training in the mechanism and virtues of tribal organization, supplemented by the modernized version provided for by Dr. Verwoerd’s Bantu Authorities Act, the precepts of “Good Conduct” include a knowledge of how to assist, amongst others, the CHIEF, the STOCK INSPECTOR, the LOCATION’S SUPERINTENDENT and the POLICEMAN. Assistance to the latter will probably follow the Gestapo method of charging children with 384
the task of spying on their parents, and reporting any anti‐Nationalist activities. By the time the child is in Standard Five, and on the verge of leaving school, he is given final trimming in the form of: “instruction and guidance in the Personal Reference Book—
why and how used, the Labor Bureau, control measures in Urban Areas, Curfew.” These are the things which he must naturally and willingly do because the society of Dr. Verwoerd and Swart have prescribed them as good, correct and commendable. It is only if and when the pupil gets to Std. VI that he is given a glimpse of the sanctuary which is above the Chief and his tribe. Even here the emphasis is on Bantu people. After a constant grinding for thirty minutes each day for eight years, the child will it is no doubt hoped, submit naturally and willingly to the dictates of the paramount Chief Verwoerd and his clique, and also regard it as his duty to persuade other Africans to do the same. Culture and Politics It is only the most blind dogmatism which makes it possible for people not to realize that if there have been no fundamental changes brought by Bantu Education, at least the changes are radical enough and create conditions for new methods of struggle, and a new emphasis on the struggle in the cultural and educational spheres. Through Bantu Education, the Nationalists have realized the inseparable unity between the cultural life of the people and their political aspirations, and they now hope to use the former to smother the latter. Surely it is the task of progressives to organize the cultural life of the people so that it serves the true interests and aspirations of the people. 385
The Key Figure The hope that African teachers will be able to teach anything other than Bantu Education in Dr. Verwoerd’s schools is based on an unrealistic assessment of the situation. Dr. Verwoerd is clearly aware that the key figure in his schemes is the teacher. He said, “So much depends upon the teacher carrying out his duties conscientiously. . .For the teacher who is not faithful in this regard there is no place in Bantu Education.” The conditions of employment of teachers make it quite clear that Dr. Verwoerd will tolerate no unfaithfulness or even criticism. It is also clearly stated that any teacher who encourages disobedience or resistance to the laws of the country or participates in political activity would be instantly dismissed. Even if, therefore, it was possible to increase the number of militant teachers who would be prepared to risk ‘their bread’ in order to serve the interests of the people, these conditions of employment, combined with the spying activities of some Principles (which will no doubt be intensified, because of the enhanced prospects of becoming a sub‐inspector) make it unlikely that such militant teachers would remain teachers for long. It should also be borne in mind that the prospects of raising the political consciousness of teachers are no better now than they were a year ago. In fact, because of their conditions of employment and the distrust which is bound to grow amongst them, the teachers can be expected to be more reticent and less responsive to the voice of the people, and a little more ‘bread conscious.’ The prospects of using teachers in schools is further diminished by the fact that Dr. Verwoerd is going to train his own Bantu Education teachers. And he is going to train them not merely to be dumb tools for his policies and schemes, but also to be active agents against the liberator movement. Apart from the fact that it is a condition of a teacher’s employment that his whole time should be at the disposal of the Native Affairs Department, Dr. Verwoerd has stated that he considers it the duty of teachers to agitate against the African 386
National Congress and to discredit its campaigns. Recently, after he had dismissed 116 teachers on the Rand, he said that he did not think that they had done sufficient work to sabotage the boycott of schools. It is important to realize that Bantu Education is not merely designed to destroy the political consciousness and understanding of the African child, so that he may be a dumb and contented serf, but it is positively designed to produce Nationalist cadres, who will sow seeds of hostility against the Liberatory movements, sabotage its campaigns and attempt to terrorize and intimidate progressive people. Bantu Education thus constitutes a positive political front against the movements. Since it is so fraught with danger for the Liberatory movements which are the bulwark of the people’s interests and aspirations, it deserves the utmost vigilance and most careful study and the most effective assault. 387
Chapter 26
“’A New World Unfolds. . . .’: Congress of the People Adopts the Freedom Charter” by Alfred Hutchinson They came in their thousands—from the cities, towns, villages, farms and faraway kraals. They came in buses, lorries, motor cars and trains. They came in all colours; they came in all ages. Ministers, factory workers, farms labourers, drivers, business men, students, doctors, teachers, clerks, workers in the kitchens. . . the call that had been made many months ago was being answered, the call that ran through the length and breadth of our vast land. The call of the people of South African to meet together to speak together, and together decide how they wanted to live, was being answered. For the first time in the history of our country, the people have met—
not as Black and White—but as “equals, countrymen and brothers.” They have met under the wheel of the Congress of the People, the 388
wheel which spanned racial considerations and proclaimed the unity of the people and their common desires. The national anthem swept upwards, carried by strong resolute voices. The voice of the absent Chief Luthuli filled the gathering, pointing the way forward‐the way to the future South Africa. It told of the wrong foundations of the Union of South Africa; the foundations of inequality and injustice and the harrowing inheritance of the people of South Africa. The Congress of the People met under the sheltering wing of the people of the world. Messages of friendship and support spanned seas and crossed high mountains; brotherly hands outstretched in support for the people in their struggle for liberation. For who does not know the urge for freedom—the passion that has haunted mankind; the passion that has always opened new worlds? The presentation of the Isitwalanwde were moving. The people of South Africa meeting as one were conferring the highest distinction on the people who have served them well. Isitwalandwe—the wearer of the feather of the rare bird almost unknown—legendary almost; the feather worn by the heroes of the people. South Africa knows her heroes. But of the three people to receive the award only Father Huddleston could be present. Dr. Dadoo and Chief Luthuli, the banned leaders of the people, were absent. Chief Luthuli was in distant Groutville but his spirit was with the people and the people had him in their hearts. You cannot banish a leader from the people. He sent his daughter, Albertina, to receive the award on his behalf. Father Huddleston stood before the people as he had done many times. For years he had fought with them. For years they had 389
tramped the difficult road together. The people loved him as he loved them. In many minds there will always remain the picture of the frail, white‐haired woman in a sari, standing under the ox‐wagon wheel of the Congress of the People. She was Dr. Dadoo’s mother and she was receiving the Isitwalanwde on behalf of her son. The mother of a hero, standing before the people, brought tears in many eyes. Three thousand men and women met together at Kliptown, Johannesburg, on the 25th and 26th June, 1955. they had been sent by their fellow men to speak for them. Now the Freedom Charter was being read, the Charter that had been drawn up by the people. For months, demands had been flowing in. The people had spoken of hunger, poverty and ignorance; of the police that broke into homes at the dead of night; of pass raids and prisons and farm gaols; they had spoken of the slums in which they live. . . the things in their lives have been discussed and now they decide that these things must end. The call that had swept through the vast land from corner to corner became alive. The people had answered the call and now they were giving it back. It would ring from city to city, from town to town and find its way back to the Kraals. The people have spoken; they have spoken in one strong voice. At night when the people had left, the wheel hung in the night. A few fires burnt and volunteers tramped the area guarding it. But the spirit of the afternoon was still there persisting like the demands of the people who would again meet in the morning. Songs of freedom continued to be heard deep into the night. At nine o’clock the representatives of the people were back at their business. The words of the Charter rang clear and unequivocally: “South Africa belongs to the people who live in it, black and white. . 390
.” South Africa had ceased to be the country of one group of the people—it belonged to all. No government could justly claim authority unless it was based on the will of all the people. The people declared that they had been robbed “of their birthright to land, liberty and peace.” The people declared that their country would never be prosperous or free until “our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities. And the people rising to sing the national anthem sealed the covenant to strive together,” until the democratic changes set out in the Charter were won. A new world, a brave new world was unfolding itself. In the new South Africa the people shall govern; the national groups shall have equal rights; the people shall share in the country’s wealth; the land shall be shared among those who work it; all shall be equal before the law; all shall enjoy equal human rights; there shall be work and security. . . There was movement in the crowd. The police had arrived. The people stood together, refused to be provoked. The police trooped to the platform. Mounted police sat on champing horses and cordons of armed police was thrown round the gathering. The police were investigating a charge of treason. The people burst into song and silently sat down. What treason was there to uncover when the people declared their aims to the country and the entire world to know? Was it treason for the people to meet and speak together? Was it treason to demand food and clothes, plenty and security? Was it treason to demand the brotherhood and equality of all men irrespective of race or colour? Was it treason to work for peace among all mankind? There was nothing to conceal and the Conference continued as the police stood watch. 391
The new South Africa unfolded once more—the South Africa the police seemed to hate and fear: The doors of learning and of culture shall be opened; there shall be houses, security and comfort; there shall be peace and friendship. Dusk was gathering when the adoption of the Charter came to an end. The children who had sung “Away with Bantu Education” were silent. Their demand had been answered. The people of South African had met; the largest and most representative assembly of the people had taken place. The Freedom Charter had been drawn up and now the delegates would take it back to the people who had sent them. In the gloom the police looked like some sentinels of lost ramparts; the representatives of an age that had gone. They insulted the people; they spat in women’s faces; they slashed the peace exhibition, completely ruining it; they pointed guns at peaceful people. . . the band struck the songs of the people and the people joined in song. They danced together and were glad together. The people cannot know fear—people who have pledged themselves to fight together in the non‐violent struggle of the people cannot know fear. The Freedom Charter has been drawn up. Another milestone has been reached on the road to freedom. Thanks to the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured Peoples’ Organisation, and the South African Congress of Democrats for having sponsored the greatest assembly of the people of South Africa. The Congress of the People must give momentum to the struggle for liberation and the fruits of it will fall to the organisations which brought it to its happy culmination. The people have spoken. 392
393
Chapter 27 Freedom Charter by The Congress of the People Adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg, on June 25 and 26, 1955. We, the People of South Africa declare for all our country and the world to know that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our county will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex, or belief; And therefore, we the people of South Africa, black and white together—equals, countrymen and brothers—adopt this Freedom Charter. And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither 394
strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won. THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN! Ever man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws; All people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country; The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex; All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self‐government. ALL NATIONAL GROUPS SHALL HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS! There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races; All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs; All national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride; The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime; All apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside. THE PEOPLE SHALL SHARE IN THE COUNTRY’S WEALTH! 395
The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people; The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well‐
being of the people; All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions. THE LAND SHALL BE SHARED AMONG THOSE WHO WORK IT! Restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land redivided amongst those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger; The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers; Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land; All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose; People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished. ALL SHALL BE EQUAL BEFORE THE LAW! 396
No one shall be imprisoned, deported or restricted without a fair trial; No one shall be condemned by the order of any Government official; The courts shall be representative of all the people; Imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re‐education, not vengeance; The police force and army shall be open to all on an equal basis and shall be the helpers and protectors of the people; All laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief shall be repealed. ALL SHALL ENJOY EQUAL HUMAN RIGHTS! The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organize, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children; The state shall recognize the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits; Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work; There shall be a forty‐hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers; Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work; 397
Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished. THE DOORS OF LEARNING AND OF CULTURE SHALL BE OPENED! The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life; All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands; The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace; Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training, shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit; Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan; Teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens; The colour bar in cultural life in sport and in education shall be abolished. THERE SHALL BE HOUSES, SECURITY AND COMFORT! All people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security; 398
Unused housing space to be made available to the people; Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no one shall go hungry; A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state; Free medical care and hospitalization shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children; Slums shall be demolished and new suburbs built where all have transport roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres; The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state; Rest, leisure and recreation shall be the right of all; Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed. THERE SHALL BE PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP! South Africa shall be a fully independent state, which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations; South Africa shall strive to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes by negotiation—not war; Peace and friendship amongst all our people shall be secured by upholding the equal rights, opportunities and status of all; 399
The people of the protectorates—Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland—shall be free to decide for themselves their own future; The right of all the peoples of Africa to independence and self‐
government shall be recognized, and shall be the basis of close cooperation. Let all who love their people and their country now say, as we say here: “THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTIL WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY.” 400
Farewell Speech by Trevor Huddleston In his farewell article, written specially for “Fighting Talk,” Father Huddleston uses the story of David and Goliath to plead for a “re‐
dedication to the cause of liberation.” When the young stripling David went down into the valley to meet Goliath, his brothers tried to dissuade him. He was too young, too immature and too reckless. Also, perhaps, he was their brother, and he would steal their thunder. His answer to their appeals was the magnificent and direct one, which stands at the head of this brief article, which is my farewell. “Is there not a cause?” It is a sad moment at which to leave South Africa: not because things are difficult and shadows dark, but because there is a battle to fight and win: a battle which is ours for the winning, if we have the faith and courage to fight it boldly. This Goliath of Racialism does a tremendous lot of shouting. It is because he needs to keep his own courage up. He likes to mock at the unarmed David who confronts him. It is because in his own heart there is a lurking fear. He stumbled forward in his armour, flourishing his sword. But he does not see more than a young boy in front of him; a young shepherd‐boy with a sling in his hand. 401
Racialism, besides being stupid, is also blind. “Is there not a cause?” I have used the story of David and Goliath, not because I think here is a complete parallel, or a perfect moral to be drawn between that battle and ours in South Africa. I have used it because I want to plead with all the conviction I have for a renewal and a rededication to the cause of liberation. During the twelve years of my stay in South Africa, I have tried to identify myself with the Country. And that has been made easy for me by the trust and affection of so very many. It is because of that identification that I have felt free to speak and to act when so many personal liberties have been attacked by the rulers of the Country, and when, in face of that attack. White South Africa has remained complacent and apathetic. We have seen, in the past twelve years, all the freedoms for which the second world war was fought and won; not merely attacked but deliberately and persistently destroyed in the Union of South Africa. The viciousness of the Pass Laws has been carried over into other spheres of legislation. It has become a crime to associate, a crime to speak, a crime to move from one place to another. You can’t be deported for daring to criticize authority: or you can be deprived of the right to leave the Country for the same reason. You can no longer shut your door and have privacy in your home, for you may be about to commit a crime: the police must have right of entry a any hour of the day or night. You can be punished for being outside a municipal area, and punished for being inside one. You can suffer imprisonment for your ignorance in not carrying correct documents: you can also suffer imprisonment for teaching children the ABC. And if you condemn “apartheid” as a social evil in the same category as slavery; and dare to say that it is also basically un‐Christian, you are 402
a traitor to your country and should be treated as such. “Is there not a cause?” The resistance to all this encroachment upon human rights and freedoms can be effective only in one way, and upon one condition. It must be based upon a belief in the absolute rightness of our cause. If we falter in this belief, then we fall into countless errors of judgment and innumerable traps and snares. To change the metaphor—we see Goliath as a mighty giant whose armour is impregnable: we forget the blindness that is his, and we take fright, instead of grasping more firmly the sling in our hands. What I mean is this. The “resistance movement” in South Africa has suffered greatly in times of crises from a sudden retreat from principle: a sudden decision that perhaps compromise is possible: that maybe even Dr. Verwoerd’s policies have somewhere their advantages. Thus, in the Western Areas Removal Scheme; the Bantu Education Act; the Bantu Authorities Act—there has been ever present the subtle temptation to try and find some way of opposition which will yet not have the appearance and character of opposition. To the natural confusion of many of our people is added this most dire confusion of all: a flight from principle and a retreat to expediency. “Is there not a cause?” We know there is. We know for one thing, that the conscience of the civilized world is awake to the evils of racialism as never before. We know that South Africa, out of step with every nation in the world, cannot conceivably persist in her present policies without facing economic and political disaster. But, beyond these things, and far more important, we know that our cause is based on an eternal and immutable truth: the inherent dignity and sacredness of human personality. To me, as a Christian and as a Priest of the Church, this is the essential thing: my rock and—to mix metaphors again—my guiding star. I have seen so much of the cruelty of racialism in the bodies of hungry children and in the fear‐haunted eyes of young men and women, that I will never attempt to come to terms with it. I have also 403
seen so much of the apathy of White South Africa—Christians and non‐Christian—in face of racialism, that I will never allow it to sleep if I can force it into wakefulness. I hope and pray that Congress may rise to its responsibilities which are so great, in a way worthy of the cause it represents. I cannot do so without sacrifice and suffering, of that I am sure. It needs courage: it also needs inspiration. I believe that it will find both. And in finding them it will discover that Goliath—Racialism—is blundering, foolish and blind. His threats are empty and his actions vain David will soon sand astride his headless corpse. At least that is my great desire. “Is there not a cause?” The Appeal of the “Keep Father Huddleston in South Africa Committee” Without wishing to enter into speculation around the reasons for Father Huddleston’s recall to Great Britain, we would like to express our very deep regret at the decision which compels him to leave this country. Father Huddleston occupies a unique place in South Africa. He has become for us, and doubtless for many other South Africans, a symbol of outstanding Christian courage and selflessness in defence of right and justice, and in promoting the best interest of both Church and people. There is, in this country today, no European who has so successfully and boldly bridged the yawning gap of hostility and fear between white men and black, and developed on both sides of the colour line, a spirit of tolerance, respect and brotherhood between men. 404
For these reasons, we believe Father Huddleston is more widely loved, respected, and followed than probably any man in the land today. He has, it is true, made enemies; but not by shirking his duty or abandoning his religious beliefs, but by upholding them stoutly and consistently at great personal cost. We have no wish to challenge the unquestionable authority of the order to which he owes‐and gives—his full allegiance. But a great gap will be left in our community by his departure; and it is unlikely that even the most able, devoted or gifted successor will be able generally, to fill that gap. We feel sure that, if the unique position occupied in our hearts by Father Huddleston were understood and appreciated by his superiors in Britain, they would be moved to retract their decision, and leave him here amongst us, where he would so strongly love to be, and where he is so desperately needed. In the circumstances, therefore, we make public appeal to the Community of the Resurrection, to leave Father Huddleston to work in South Africa for the future well‐being of both Church and people. We feel sure that there are many others in this country who will echo our plea. Chapter 29 Towards A Cultural Boycott of South Africa by A. M. Kathrada 405
The progress towards maturity of a national movement brings with it new problems, new tasks and new issues, often requiring new policies, or rather, precise policies in ever‐increasing spheres of life. Whereas a decade ago the national organizations could have been satisfied with a purely political programme, their development in recent years has had an increasing influence and effect on a wider strata of people. Although there have been occasions in the past when the people’s organizations have been called upon to declare their attitudes on questions not dealt with in their programmes, essentially their main interest was restricted to the political field. So that today they find themselves in the position where they have no clearly defined policies towards several important questions. Such a question for instance is the cultural relationship between South Africa and the outside world a question which of late has evoked much interest and some spontaneous action abroad. In the years since the end of the Second World War our country has been visited by scores of foreign artists—theatre groups, dance and cultural ensembles—and scores more are scheduled to come. While ninety‐nine percent of their performances have been restricted to European audiences, a few shows have been organized for the Non‐
White people. South African cultural groups also have visited foreign lands. There have also been a few token protests on the part of foreign artists against racialism in South Africa. Notable of these was the refusal of Jazz Band leader Ted Heath to come to South Africa and the resolution of the British Musicians’ Union. On both these actions of definite political significance, the national organizations in South Africa have remained silent. Naturally this gives rise to important questions. Should we continue to remain silent? Do we agree with Ted Heath’s action, and if so should similar action not be encouraged? If foreign artists do come to South Africa 406
should we not arrange for them to appear before Non‐White audiences? Isn’t a greater cultural, sports and economic exchange in line with the international trend for peaceful co‐existence? On these questions three distinct schools of thought seem to be apparent in this country. Firstly, there are those who are for maintaining the status quo: i.e., foreign artists should continue to come and it is immaterial whether they perform to Non‐Whites or not. Secondly, there are the people who would like to see more and more foreign artists visit this country provided they could be made to undertake to perform for Non‐Whites as well. This group falls into line with the attitude taken by the British Musicians’ Union, and also, the writer believes, by the Union of Southern African Artists. The third school of thought maintains that it should be the policy of the progressive movement to work towards an international cultural boycott of South Africa as a protest against racialism. We have to consider which one of these courses would most contribute towards the progress or enhance the cause of the oppressed people of South Africa. The first course we could eliminate without any discussion. Briefly the protagonists of the second course take the stand that:‐‐ (a) With the very restricted opportunities open to Non‐Whites in the field of culture, regular performances by overseas artists would go a long way towards filling the vacuum. We would rather see Dame Sybil Thorndyke even if she appears at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre than not see her at all.” 407
(b) Politically, the movement could benefit immensely if artists of the stature of Sybil Thorndyke could after first‐hand experience return to their countries and espouse the cause of oppressed South Africa. (c) If artists such as Paul Robeson were to perform in this country it would help to explode the myth of race superiority, and finally (d) Being believers in peaceful co‐existence between peoples, cultural exchanges between countries would greatly enhance our cause. The third school of thought, to which the writer subscribes, naturally dismisses the protagonists of the first course. As for the second school, the writer believes that while the arguments advanced are worthy of consideration, they have to be rejected in the light of the peculiar conditions existing in South Africa. To obviate possible misunderstandings and unnecessary argument it should be clarified at the outset that he believers of the international boycott base their premise on the point of view that at this stage of development international pressure against South Africa’s racial policies coupled with the local struggle, will greatly further the cause of freedom. This stand is not to be confused with local questions such ad Non‐Whites being forced to accept segregation in various walks of South African life. They base their stand primarily on the view that the perpetrators of racialism in this country derive strength and courage from the closeness that they (the racialists) feel to the outer world; indeed from the almost tacit consent and recognition that they receive from particularly the Western countries in the form of cultural and sports contact, economic and military association. The writer believes that racialist South Africans must be made to feel more and more that they stand alone in the whole world in their belief of racial superiority. They must be made to feel the pinch of 408
isolation from the civilized world in the spheres of culture, sports, etc. When viewing the reasons advanced by the Second school against this background all the merit in their arguments falls away. No freedom loving South African can disagree that South African racialism must be isolated from the world. And the most effective way open at the present time is for the outside world to make known its antagonism to what is happening here. Let us weight the arguments of the Second school from the point of view of their political value to the freedom struggle. Foreign artists come to South Africa and perform to a few Non‐White audiences. Good. Some of them go back to their countries and speak out against racial discrimination and for the people’s struggle. Very valuable. But, what impact does all this have on the day‐to‐day struggle for our people? The few thousand Non‐Whites who manage to attend performances rendered by Dame Sybil Thorndyke or Yehudi Menuhin are very impressed. For them it’s been the opportunity of a lifetime—absolutely unforgettable. For them there will remain a lasting memory of great cultural figures of distant lands. But as far as the overwhelming majority of the people are concerned, they remain quite unaffected by the visit of these distinguished guests. All right, one in a hundred of these artists goes back and makes statements or appears on public platforms to condemn racial discrimination. This gives rise to a furore in the White press and accusations are leveled about abuse of hospitality, about incompetence to judge a country by a few weeks’ visit, etc., etc. But all this is momentary. While they have a good effect, in a few days it is forgotten: life returns to normal and the plight of South Africa once again fades away from people’s minds and press columns. All is quiet until there is a repetition and again the same process. 409
All this is becoming too monotonous. The time has come when we must move forward. The chain of criticism, the pinch to racialist South Africa must become continuous, unending, until they are made to think; until they are made to realize that each unit in society has its responsibilities to the greater whole; until they are made to appreciate the indispensability of inter‐dependence. We are told that artists such as Paul Robeson, Ram Gopal and other Non‐White cultural figures would help to explode the myth of racial superiority. We agree entirely. But in the conditions existing in our country such a possibility must remain a dream. Definitely not in the foreseeable future can one imagine Paul Robeson being allowed to come here, or to perform before audiences of Whites and Non‐
Whites. Finally, there is the very important question of peaceful co‐existence. Non‐White South Africans, like the common peoples all over the world, want to live in peace and harmony with other peoples all over the world, want to live in peace and harmony with other peoples. But it is entirely erroneous to use the argument of peaceful co‐existence to offset an international cultural boycott. One can talk of promoting co‐
existence when talking of the French and Russian people or the Chinese and Indian people or for that matter of any people in the world. But as far as South Africa is concerned, here again we have our peculiar conditions. Peaceful co‐existence between whom? Between the Soviet people and a minority of the people of South Africa who rule the country and who solely enjoy all the rights to culture, education, etc.? What would be more beneficial politically? An artiste troupe coming to South Africa from the Soviet Union and leaving behind wonderful impressions among a tiny fraction who partake of the country’s cultural life? Or the Soviet troupe refusing to come to this country and thereby winning the admiration and gratitude of the overwhelming majority of the peoples? 410
One cannot just pick on a popular demand of the time and apply it mechanically to any country and to any situation. Of course, everyone would love to see Madame Ulanova or the Janacek Quartet, Yehudi Menuhin and the other great artists of the world. But the times demand a sacrifice in favour of the greater long‐term benefit to the cause of the people’s struggle. The continued performances by international cultural figures in South Africa will leave behind fine memories for a comparatively few people. The greater majority of the people will remain indifferent. But, let the artists and actors of the world boycott South Africa and thus help further the cause of progress and freedom. Chapter 30 The Story of Bethal by Henry Nxumalo In order to discover the truth about the way contracts are signed, Mr. Drum himself decided to become a farm recruit. He was soon picked up outside the Pass Office by one of the touts or ‘runners’ who look out for unemployed Africans, and are paid for each man they collect for the agencies. He was taken to an employment agency, where he 411
did not, of course, give his real name, Mr. Drum, but adopted the name of GEORGE MAGWAZA. He said he had no pass, and, with many others, we told that he would be given a pass if he signed a contract to go and work out of Johannesburg: this is the normal way of dealing with people without passes. He chose to work on a farm in Springs, and was sent to –‘s compound, where he waited nearly a day before he could sign the contract. When the contract came to be signed the interpreter read out a small part of the contract to a number of recruits together, while the attesting officer held a pencil over the contract. No one asked the age of any of the recruits (they should have consent of parents if under eighteen), and Mr. Drum was told nothing about whether his pay would be monthly or deferred, what food he was entitled to, or what length of shift he would work. N A D African Clerk (calling roll of everyone on the contract sheet): You’re going to work on a farm in the Middleburg district: you’re on a six months’ contract. You will be paid £3 a month, plus food and quarters. When you leave here you will be given an advance of 5s. for pocket money, 10s. 5d. for food, and 14s. 5d. for train fare. The total amount is £1 9s. 5 d. and this amount will be deducted from your first month’s wages. Have you got that? The above Contract of Service was read aloud, interpreted and fully explained to the abovementioned Natives, who acknowledged that they understood the same and voluntarily affixed their signatures (or marks) thereto in my presence, and in the presence of……………………...Labour Agent, acting on behalf of……………………….. All additions, erasures and alterations have been signed by me. 412
The provisions of the Native Service Contract Act, 1932, have been complied with. The consent of parents or guardians of Natives aged between sixteen and eighteen years recruited for agricultural purposes has been produced to me. The number of Natives attested on this Contract Sheet is………………………… PLACE…………………………. ………………………………….. ATTESTING OFFICER DATE………………………. Mr. Drum and other recruits: Yes. Clerk: You will now proceed to touch the pencil. Mr. Drum: But I was told before that I was going to be sent to a farm in Springs. Why am I now going to Middleburg? Clerk: I’m telling you where you’re going, according to your contract sheet, and nothing else. So Mr. Drum refused to touch the pencil when he reached the attesting officer, and was told to wait outside for his pass. The other recruits then ran past the attesting officer, each holding the pencil for a moment, which was not even touching the paper. Mr. Drum, who can read and write English, had no opportunity either to sign his name or read the contract—but on his way out, he succeeded in obtaining a contract. As a result of holding a pencil for a second (50 recruits were attested in a few minutes), the recruits were considered to be bound to a contract. But in fact the contract had not been signed and had not been fully understood. So it seems that none 413
of the contracts ‘signed’ in this way are valid at all (Native Labor Regulation Act of 1911, as amended 1949). To find out what happened after the contracts had been signed, Mr. Drum went to Bethal to obtain the facts at first hand. With a good deal of difficulty and sometimes at some risk, Mr. Drum succeeded in talking to a large number of people most closely concerned with farm conditions, and carefully compared and checked the different accounts. Sometimes the farmers themselves were friendly, and at one farm Mr. Drum was presented with a sack of potatoes. Mr. Drum was very careful not to cause any trouble or enmity on the farms, and never tried to influence what people said. Out of over 50 labourers interviewed on eight farms stretching from Witbank to Kinross, not a single labourer admitted that he was satisfied with the conditions. Those who did not express this view refused to comment altogether, for fear that they might be victimized. Two thirds of those consulted said they were sent to Bethal under false pretences: they were wither promised soft jobs in Johannesburg or on dairies in the Springs district, but they subsequently found themselves being made to alight at Bethal Station and told they were going to work there. A man from Nyasaland described how the touts employed by a certain labour agency in his country worked. There was a certain boundary which many people crossed in order to get to the Union. The touts lay in wait there to intercept, and when they saw one trying to cross the area they immediately pounced upon him and threatened him with arrest for trespass if he did not accept the offer of a contract to work in South Africa as a waiter. The victim only realized on arriving in the Union that he had been tricked and contracted to work on a farm. 414
Joseph ‐‐, who said he was 14 years old, told me he was recruited by X’s agency, in the Northern Transvaal to work in a clothing factory at Springs. He was given an advance of 10s. for food and a train ticket, only to discover at Springs that he was going to work on a farm at Bethal at £2 a month. Mzuzumi—(30) says he was recruited in Natal by Siz’Abafane Employment Agency, given a 10s. advance and told he would work in Johannesburg. He had no pass then and accepted the six months’ contract as a solution to his problem. Siz’Abafane’s guide got their party to alight at Bethal Station in the dead of night and told them that is where they were going to work. The pay on the farms is between £2 and £3 a month, and the food consists mainly of porridge, with meat sometimes once a week, if that. Months are calculated on the basis of 30 full working shifts, excluding non‐working days such as Sundays and public holidays, and the wages for the first month are spent in repaying train fares and money advanced to the labourers as a loan on recruitment. For example, R—F—(60), employed on the farm of Mr. B., was recruited by Z’s Agency, of Johannesburg. He earns £3 a month and has a wife and four children to support at home. His fare to Johannesburg was £6s. 11d., and his whole wages for the first month repaid this sum. He will have £15 3s. 1 d. to his credit at the end of his six months’ contract. But if he decides to return home he will be minus another £2 16s. 11d. when he reaches Louis Trichardt, which means that he will be left with £12 6s. 2 d. in cash, or even less should he ask for tobacco or clothes on credit from his employer before that time, to say nothing of what he will spend on his journey home. And that half a year’s work. 415
Labourers admitted that farmers are always willing to give them credit when their clothes give in, and although few farmers have their own shops, labourers told Mr. Drum that farmers keep large supplies of khaki clothes which they sell to their labourers on credit at the exorbitant price of £12s, a shirt and £2 10s. a pair of trousers. Older men prefer to wear sacks in which holes have been cut for head and arms, and sleep on sacks instead of blankets rather than incur more debt. Very often the boss boys, themselves Africans, are tough and ruthless with the labourers, for if they are not they lose their jobs. Most boss boys are old employees who have acquired the important status of permanent squatters on the farms, where they live with their families and repay the farmer by working for him free of charge. They enjoy certain facilities, such as the use of a horse when they supervise the labourers. At Bethal Hospital I found Casbert Tutje, from Cetani, Cape Province, who together with three other friends, was also recruited by Siz’Abafane Agency in Natal. From there they were sent to the farm of Mr. X at Bethal, to work as labourers at £3 a month each. This happened in November, 1950. The foursome was invited by a family squatting on the farm to a beer drinking party on Christmas Day, but, as the farmer would not grant them permission to attend, they left the compound without leave that morning. The boss boy had left the compound gate open. The farmer sent for them and they were severely punished, then handed over to the police. They were brought before the Court on a charge of desertion and sentenced to two months each. The farmer 416
then arranged that their terms of imprisonment be served on his farm, where they were again thrashed by the boss boys severely. It was in the course of this that Casbert sustained serious internal injuries which resulted in his being admitted to hospital from time to time. He gradually became weak and sickly, and spent more of his time lying in the hospital than working on the farm. Before his contract expired in 1951 the doctor advised that he was unfit for farm work and should be sent home. The farmer refused to pay Casbert his wages, however, stating that he had not completed his contract and still owed money for an overall purchased on credit; he would not give him his pass either. Casbert was given the sum of 10s. for food and told to leave the farm. And when he reported the matter to the Native Commissioner he was told that nothing could be done about it. His next alternative was to seek employment on another farm, with a view to obtaining a new pass and getting money to pay for his fare home. Here, to, he had to sign another contract. He is not home yet. He has been a patient at Bethal Hospital since September, 1951, and is now diagnosed as a pulmonary TB case with little hope of recovery. He still has the new contract to complete. Another farm in the Bethal area is probably the only one with a compound modeled on the same lines as a Reef mine compound; with the exception that it is dirtier. A unique feature of it is that it has its own private hospital, a crowded, dirty, small brick building with iron beds and sick labourers lying on mattresses without blankets and vice versa. They sleep in their dirty working clothes, and I was told by the man in charge, P—T‐‐, that the men are sent to Bethal Hospital if they do not improve after receiving treatment from a local doctor. P—has been 417
working on the farm for 32 years and is better known by the name of ‘doctor.’ He is probably the best‐paid African farm labourer: he earns £8 plus a bag of mealie meal a month, and has his family living with him on the farm. He told me that his treatment for sick farm labourers consisted mainly of regular doses of Epsom salts. Next to the ‘hospital’ is the compound and the kitchen. Besides Emmanuel, the cook was the only other person wearing boots on the premises, the others being bare‐footed. But the cooks’ clothes were as filthy with grease as those of an oil engine fitter who has not changed his overalls for many months. The filth shone at a distance. The men ate out of improvised zinc containers which they made themselves. One labourer told me that he could not afford to buy himself a proper dish at that stage of his contract; but this was an improvement on what I saw on some farms at lunch‐time, where the labourers not only wore sacks but ate on them. I met the European in charge of the farm on my second visit, but he refused to allow Mr. Drum to take pictures of the compound and stated that I had erred by asking his men about working conditions on the farm on my visit there, without his permission. He said he did not want a repetition of what Michael Scott did. People living in Bethal tell labourers who died of cold while deserting or simply while living in the compounds, and there are farmers who, probably because of their ruthlessness or otherwise, are known by such names as Mabulala (the Killer) and Fake Futheni (Hit Him in the Marrow), and so on. Most of the compounds I saw look much like jails. They have high walls, they are dirty and are often so closely attached to a cattle kraal that the labourers breathe the same air as the cattle at night. Some labourers told Mr. Drum that they are locked in at night. 418
There are a few private schools on farms at Bethal, but the biggest school in the area is the Bethal United High and Senior School at Bethal Location, which has an enrollment of over 1,300 children. Mr. Wycliffe Khayiana, the principal, who identifies himself with the hardships and sufferings of the local community, told me that the so‐
called Trek Pass system was dealing a bad blow to the education of the children. When squatters are made to vacate a farm they take their children with them; quite often this happens in the middle of the school term. Over 100 children a year leave school in this way, either during the first term in the year or before the examinations at the end of the year. Not only is the schooling span of the children shortened by this, but other children who would benefit by attending school and are kept out of it because of lack of space are made to suffer unnecessarily. In an endeavor to have at least one out of three children educated, a Bethal widow recently moved on to a farm for the first time with only two children, leaving the other at a boarding school. But the farmer found out about him when he was home on holiday, and that was the end of his school career—he was made to work on the farm too. Last December the Bethal branch of the African National Congress invited Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, to visit the area in connection with the deteriorating position of the African farm labourers. The Minister replied through his private secretary that he was unable to do that before the present parliamentary session; at any rate, he was kept fully informed on matters in the Bethal area, and the information at his disposal was the same as that given by the chiefs who recently visited the area, namely, that the workers were ‘generally well treated by their employers, and had to real grievances.’ 419
But Congress officials deny all knowledge of these chiefs and their visit to Bethal, and hardly anyone at Bethal knew anything about them. We wish to emphasize that while the Industrial Revolution is causing as much chaos in South Africa as it caused in 19th Century Europe no lessons have been learnt fro the industrial past whatever. The same abuse of labour is repeated in the same style. Farm prisons and contracted labour by‐pass the normal need to attract men by improved working conditions and higher wages. They depend upon compulsion, no persuasion. Most men who touch the pencil for a farm contract are hungry, ignorant and urgently in need of work. Once they have touched the pencil they have handed themselves over to an unknown area under largely unknown conditions. It is obvious that care has been taken by the authorities to protect these people and equally plain that they have failed. For once men have ‘signed’ themselves away, itself often a trick, they are taken to an isolated farm where they are at the mercy of the farmer and his boss boys; brought back by the police if they run away; and liable to every abuse with no chance of being able to protect themselves. We ask, when farm life is so often satisfactory, what are the conditions which have given Bethal so fearful and exceptional a history—and we reply: it is the system, the farm contract system that has had so vile a result. Chapter 31 420
The South African Police by Harry Bloom 421
Chapter 32 The Stars of Jazz by Todd Matshikiza The location slept peacefully all night till just after midnight. AT something like twenty past midnight the residents began to shift uneasily in their beds because the sound of the church bell at the Moravian Mission in Scanlan Street was clanging loud. Loud. As loud as any sound is heard at that time of night when everything else is quiet. The sound of the Moravian Church bell might not have been disturbing but for two reasons. First, it was ringing at that time of night, which might have meant, as the custom is still understood today in most churches, that someone had passed away at that hour. A well‐known church‐attending resident had died. In that case the residents wake up, sit up and think up all those things that the dead one meant or didn’t mean during life A wretch, a coon or a regular fool. A king, a kong or “God what a loss.” Second, the sound of that bell was disturbing anytime. It was a large bell with a huge crack in its side. The crack made the bell sound like so much water taking a gurgle. Grong. Grong. Grong. And d’you know who was ringing the bell? GASHE. Gashe, the jazz organist with a crazy shriek across his brain. He’d just returned from a jazz session in the location. Gashe. We called him “Boet Gashe” in 1928 because he was older than we were, but more so because he used to 422
delight in wearing hideous masks and frightening us from our parents’ laps at the concerts if he wasn’t ringing his mischievous midnight bells. But if he had an all‐night session playing jazz organ at the beer‐brewing and pleasure‐soaked west end of Queenstown location, then the church concerts fared well. He was the only jazz organist. No pianos in those days. His organ was carted on a donkey truck from house, and wherever it moved, the people went. Queenstown was happily situated for Gasbe because every train bearing miners (“mine boys” in South African English) between the Eastern Cape and Johannesburg stopped there overnight. And the miners’ veins were full with jazz, as they were with women, and they got both at Gashe’s jazz sessions. We looked upon the women Handjievol, Nomadabi, Annatjie, Nodoli and others with awe. Us kids knew those women’s names weren’t clean, though we never knew why. But we knew they were the women that danced where Gashe played. Gashe’s dances were called “I‐Tswari” where you paid 3d. at the door and entered into a dingy, stuffy room where the dust from the dancers’ feet smothered the solitary paraffin lamp which flickered in the shadows of dancing partners who could hardly see or didn’t know each other. The hostess hunched next to a four‐gallon tin of beer in the corner. She sold jam tins full at 6d. a gulp and held her hand open for another 1s. if the client wanted to go into the room behind the curtain. But actually one saw nothing in that dust. Not even Gashe, who was bent over his organ in one corner, thumping the rhythm from the pedals with is feet, which were also feeding the organ with air; choking the organ with persistent chords in the right hand, and improvising for an effective melody with his left hand. He would call in the aid of a cuestick to hold down a harmonic note, usually the tonic (doh) or the dominant (soh), both of which persist in African music, and you saw the delirious effect of perpetual motion. Perpetual motion. Perpetual motion in a musty hold where man 423
makes friends without restraint. Where Gashe plays “I‐Tswari”—a music consisting of three chords fighting themselves infinitely over four, five or six hours each night, punctuated only by murmurs and groans of deep satisfaction. Finished only when Gashe stops for a draught of beer, which is part of his pay. In the morning, the men have pawned their papers, passes and purses. They’ve had their fun, and the women too. And Gashe trucks his organ to the next “Tswari.” Gashe moved from Queenstown to explore the Golden City. He found Chapter 33 What The South African Negro Reads And Writes by Ezekiel Mphahlele In a renascent continent like Africa, it should be interesting to probe into the stuff that the South African Negro reads and writes. There are about 3,000,000 Negroes living in the towns and cities of South Africa, 3,000,000 in the <reserves> (reserved rural areas) and another three million on white farms as labour tenants and contract labourers. So when we speak of the material that Africans write and 424
read, we are thinking of it mostly within the circle of the three million urbanized people and the smaller section of literate peasantry in the reserves. Farm labourers are discounted. In the towns and the cities we are thinking of the school teacher, the pupil, the literate factory worker, the literate clerk and messenger, who are increasing in number. In the rural areas, because of the constant movement of eople between the reserves and the cities, Africans there are becoming more and more literate, although at a slow rate. Although the percentage of literacy among negroes is not high generally there is emerging a most significant proletariat readership and literary activity. First, what do our people read? For many years missionary church denominations have produced sectional religious newspapers, mostly in vernacular languages. With the attainment of higher educational standards and the rapid process of urbanization, the Negro has to a large extent shaken off missionary literature. As far back as seventy years ago a few Africans in the Cape Province struck out on their own to establish a weekly newspaper. They were prompted by the fact that they had been compelled to write certain things and not others (pertaining to politics) for missionary papers. With the passage of time, discriminatory laws were piling up against Africans, and they were finding missionary teaching inadequate. Education was regarded as an economic weapon: you learned how to read and write because you had to work for a white man and had to understand his instructions. Because our parents were earning too little (average of £8 per month), they could not maintain you in school, and you had to leave school after four years—to work. The same conditions prevail today. But there is the other plan on which the African has already begun to assess the value of education—the cultural, as distinct from the basic economic. The 425
most elementary kind of education is enough to set a spark that will put the whole human personality aflame, and start it in restless pursuit of further knowledge through the medium of the printed word. On both planes, Negro readership is assuming more and more important dimensions. But it is primarily proletariat. A Negro middle class in South Africa is still a myth in terms of readership. The Negro intellectual is among the poorest members of our society. If he does not take a teacher’s course‐the short cut to a means of livelihood,‐‐he must be lucky enough to afford a medical or law profession. Otherwise, he is not wanted in the city. The white man regards him with suspicion; the higher his educational standard is, the less likely he is to get a job. The shite man thinks the educataed African is always “getting in the way”. It is from the ranks of the proletariat that you find hundreds of workers aspiring towards a literature that is commonly regarded as the privilege of the middle class. The Negro has become an avid reader of newspapers and periodicals, for local politics and international affairs and events. He wants to know a number of things, and that quickly. He laps up news material with an ever‐
burning thirst, because few Negroes have the opportunity of a decent schooling. The last decade has seen the emergence of a number of magazines controlled by European enterprise (there is no independent Negro press. One independent Cape Coloured weekly exists in the Cape Peninsula). The white businessman could not have “cashed in” at a more opportune moment to exploit the ever‐growing market. The proprietors have set arbitrary standards for the content of their magazines which they would like to believe will sell well. Sex, crime and love are some of the dominant features, presented often in semi‐
American slang, semi‐literary English, in bright effervescent style that is a mixture of imitation and experimentation. 426
Outside these features, to take African Drum, a Johannesburg magazine, as an example, there are the short story, pen portraits of personalities, and political stories, written in good literary style. That has, however, not yet struck a distinctive note. Although this and other journals are exclusively for Negro and Coloured readership, they employ a white editor with an African editorial staff and reporters. Drum enjoys the biggest sales in Africa. Then there is a good deal of cheap American and British fiction that finds favour with city workers. This includes crime and detective fiction (the most popular) like Peter Cheyney’s, Mickey Spillane’s, James Hadley Chases’s. This and other brands of adventure fiction actually eclipse the love story. In this the African probably shares his preferences with the other workers of the world. Africans who have had the good luck to go up to secondary school and have been introduced to the classics, have a great love for Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Dostolevsky, Gorky, and Edgar Allan Poe. They are loved for their robust characters and deep humanity, for the robust humour and for the paths and suffering that are so much a mirror of our own social set‐up in South Africa. What is more, the Negro sees a bigness in these writers that goes beyond themselves and his frustration. The conflict between good and evil with which they are pre‐occupied assumes in these writers immense proportions—larger than life. This is a land of violence and darkness, and Poe, as well as the others, fit into this mood, just as crime fiction, in some way effects a crude kind of catharsis. Books that treat of contemporary South African life with a heal‐thy perspective find a particularly soft spot in the Negro: books like Peter Abraham’s, Alan Paton’s and Harry Bloom’s. Statistics taken from eight municipal libraries in Johannesburg, which are exclusively for use by Negroes, show that over a particular year, the number of fiction books borrowed was 18,497, as against 17,885 427
non‐fiction books. The significance of the small margin between the two figures lies in the fact that the Negro, even after leaving school, continues to thirst for factual knowledge—perhaps to make up for what he could not get at school. I have here merely given outstanding signposts in the reading habits of the African. Library facilities are appallingly limited. No municipality in the country allows Africans to borrow their city library books or read on the spot. Municipal libraries in African locations house deplorably small collections and the Negro’s income does not allow for much “literary luxury”—not even for cheap editions of good literature. Any writer who seeks guidance from these signposts in determining what he will find himself on slippery ground. Just as in dress and food, popular taste in literature is an elusive element to deal with. Often it can be tyrannical, or tame, or indifferent, or downright crude and vulgar, or just stupid. And so we keep shifting our literary standards, taking up new positions in judging this or that literary work. And more often than not, modes of life determine what we want to read and therefore what we want to write for our readership. One may get the impression that the reading public is always at the mercy of writers or vice versa. And yet, political, social and economic systems play an important role in deciding what people shall write and read; which, after all, accounts for the link between literature and human existence. What does the Negro write? Vernacular writings have been confined to school readership up to now This is a disaster, because school inspectors must advise publishers on any book written in the vernacular on its suitability or otherwise for pupils. If it contains anything that is likely to “Put the reader wise” on the South Arican political set‐up, it cannot be published. And so, writers like Mofolo, 428
author of Chaka (a historical romance), Plaatjie, author of Mhudi—to mention only writers who have been translated into Continental languages—limit their literature to harmless if charming romances, versified praises and other lyrical vapourings and love stories. There are about ten other writers who, in spite of themselves, find themselves compelled to prostitute their literary gifts this way. They hardly touch the fringe of the poetry of our social evils and injustices. Their works are gems for their own sake, “lying in state”, as it were, or standing still like statuettes, if you like. They lack the dynamic force that hits all the planes of our experience—the emotional, physical and intellectual; they are parochial; not because the writers lack force, but because they had to limit their literature to the school market dictated by “educationists” and missionaries, who are part of the ruling class. They do not tell the whole truth about life. One writer whose Xhosa classic is being translated into English is A.C. Jordaan, a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Cape Town. A liberally translated title of his book is “The Wrath of the Gods”. It is a significant departure. It introduces for the first time in the history of Negro fiction writing in South Africa the intellectual element. The story tells of a young man who is spirited away by a Pondomise clique (belonging to a Pondo tribe) for fear that he will _________ uncle who has usurped his chieftainship. They ___________ the district of Alice where he lives in hiding. The word is spread he is dead. At Fort Hare University College, in the same district, he comes in contact with Western culture. During this time the young man falls in love with a girl who is attending school at Lovedale, a missionary institution near Fort Hare. He wants to marry her. Difficulties arise when the clique entices him back to the Pondomise tribe to claim his chieftainship. 429
His uncle is deposed. The tribe wants the new chief to marry a clan girl. If he insists, as he does, on marrying a Christian, he must take two wives. He gets his way and married the educated girl. The wife finds it very difficult to conform to tribal customs in dress, code of behaviour, etc., and earns a bad name among the tribe. One day, as her baby plays around the hut, a harmless snake comes and coils itself near the child. The snake is the totem of the tribe, and is believed to be a child of the gods, ‐‐a blessed messenger. The mother finds it and is filled with such horror that she beats it, in spite of the warnings of an old man who is about. She kills it. The chief finds himself compelled to send his wife away to her home, as the whole tribe feels outraged and in bad odour with the gods. The woman becomes insane. One day she comes upon her son and drowns herself together with him, in a nearby river. The chief also commits suicide in the same fashion. Jordaan portrays the clash between the two sides of our life—the Western Christian and the traditional. In a sense it is an allegory of the mightier ironic conflict between systems of life that may needeach other to create a greater world. The short story has now become the common medium of the younger African authors who write in English. (There being at least four main language groups spoken among Africans besides English and South African Dutch, most of us write in English so as to teach not only all our language groups but also the outside world.) And what short stories! They teem with kissing men and women whose “eyes hold” while “time stands still”; characters swoon and languish and dissolve in their sentimental tears, and choke in the “smoke raised with the fume of sighs”. The lovers end up sweetly and live happily ever after; and everybody in the story, the writer included, suffocates helplessly 430
under the tyranny of poetic justice that screams hoarsely in well‐
known American nation: “crime does not pay!” The pattern is well known. It has a purely mathematical response: a breathtaking meeting and a sigh; a heartbreak and tears; a solution and happiness. Typical escapist literature that is a poor copy of Hollywood and half‐crown thrillers. There is a parallel to this trend of development—for it is a movement—in our music. There is a spate of Negro music “composition” in our country just now that his hatching hundreds of sentimental songs with vernacular love lyrics. They amount to some Americanized argon that fizzles out as soon as it has been conceived by a fevered brain. It has tons and tons of juke box stuff and very few or no traces of our indigenous idiom. Gramophone recording companies are thriving on this kind of music and therefore promoting it. The one encouraging aspect of our music is that which shows an ingenious combination of indigenous idiom and rhythms with local and contemporary colour and history within the framework of European notation and form. This is to be found in all our music in varying degrees of sensitivity and ability. In the same way, a small body of African writers are producing short stories an anthology of which would provide anybody with the rich multicoloured drama of Africa. Drum magazine, although still conservatively blind to the growing interest of Negro readers in things that have a serious social significance, is doing something to give expression to this talent. There is a deplorable lack of literature about peasants, because those of us who can write are for the most part urbanized or only semi‐rural. Besides, owing to a shortage of land and the arid conditions of our rural life, there is very little of what one can call a stable peasantry. However, race relations on 431
white people’s farms and the instability of life here and in the reserves afford a vast amount of material for fiction writing. Still this proletariat writing is very important for Africa. It tells the story of the violence, the strength and weakness, the laughter and tears, the enigma of our continent. We are still going to get more and more of it. The story of Africa has not been told yet. The white man has tried to tell it, using black and white colours. But within the present social structure of South Africa, where intimate contact between black and white is often sinful, the white man has failed to tell the story adequately. To mention only the four first‐rank writers ; (Olive Schreiner) in spite of her strong sense of justice regarded the non‐
white as part of the setting, passive and waiting for some individual philanthropy. William Plomeri was so cynical about white civilization that he romanticized and idealized African character from a superficial knowledge of it. Sarah Gertrude Millin (of God’s Stepchildren fame) regarded her Hottentot and half‐caste characters as groveling, helpless victims of a fate: accidental or self‐imposed mixed marriages. Alan Platon, sentimentalized his black characters in order to prove the effectiveness of a liberal theory that he posed. Peter Abrahams has done his bit, but he has now adopted another climate. Our intelligentsia have always been alive to the misrepresentation of our thoughts and feelings to the outside world by such white writers as Stuart Cloete. They have begun to realize that the real story of Africa will not be found in the sentimental puddles of Los Angeles; the luxury flats of London; the gambling and fashion houses of Paris; the bazaars of Cairo or Delhi; not even in the misty world of Rider Haggard’s or John Buchan’s lost cities and kingdoms and noble savages; or in the schoolboy adventure yarns or missionary case histories or pulpit morals. 432
It is found in our shanty towns; our dark cities; our hole‐filled and squalid streets; living conditions not very different from those of Gorky’s describes so vividly; in our longings, frustrations, hopes, loves and hates. The intellectual element is vital in this context. What does the black man think about the scheme of things, his position in the polity? He has become disillusioned in missionary teaching. For three centuries the white man has been worried about evangelizing and teaching the African and not bothered an iota about learning from him. When the black man thinks about the scheme of things and his place in it, he begins to realize that a number of evils have for a long time been justified on “moral” grounds. The rest of society has taken its cue from the ruling class, and its organization, its newspapers, its literature have adopted corrupt political systems as morally acceptable. The writer, however, refused to be told what to write by any political clique. He finds he is too close to the situation to write calmly, and too close not to be involved and entangled in its barbed coils. There’s the rub. After all, bitterness is not a healthy state of mind and feeling to revel in. It is just as painful as, and even more dangerous than, chafing chains. You can cure a physical wound; it is not so easy to cure the malady of bitterness—and its after‐effects. These are the things that often bedevil Negro writing. The extreme opposite of overwhelming bitterness is the kind of escapism which produces love, sex and crime literature. Between the two extremes, the Negro writer is trying to find a way. He recognizes two planes of truth: absolute (or ultimate truth), and truth that lives in an historical context. The former does not interest him: he has heard historical truth, he tried to seek, through his writings, beauty in man, that thing in man which has permanence and stands the test of political change. And so, while his literature touches the chords of a brutal past and 433
present, he tried to direct a searching gaze into the misty but hopeful future. Chapter 34 Dolly Rathebe by Can Themba 434
The first and most exciting man in my life, dear Can, was my father. I can’t imagine any man having a greater influence on me. I simply worshipped the man, but, like all other things considers sacred, he didn’t last long. After his death, men didn’t seem the same to me; they seem to have lost that manly tang, that rough, tough masculinity that makes men so adorable. Nowadays, men have become catty, peevish, gossipy and mean; women haven taken to wearing pants. So say 26‐year‐old Dolly Rathebe, just about Africa’s most famous and exciting woman torchsinger. And yet she is not Dolly Rathebe at all. She was born Josephine Malatsi. That’s her real name. When Dolly was still at school she had a friend whose name was Dolly Rathbe. Our Dolly loved her so much that she just took over her name and called herself Dolly Rathebe. And that is how the world came to know her. This Dolly Rathebe—the real one—is none other than Eileen Dolly Rathebe, the daughter of Mr. J. R. Rathebe. She later went to Fort Hare, where she won the B.Sc. degree. She is now married to medical student Edward Makbene, who is studying at Witwatersand University. The film star Dolly Rathebe just took over her friend’s name for the fun of it. But back of it all was the uncertainty Dolly felt about conditions at home. Things were beginning to bust up. And at school Dolly was a tomboy. (But she was fond of boys!) She looked at life from the male point of view and seemed to have a quarrel with her Maker for creating her female. At one time the reverend father of St. Cyprian’s, Sophiatown, where Dolly schooled, wanted someone to go u the tower and release the hammer of the bell that had got caught. Without hesitation Dolly clambered up the tower and loosened the hammer. The boys still talk of the “bird’s eye view” they got on that occasion. But she was smart. Always trim and neatly dressed, she looked as if she came from a very good and decent home. Suddenly, however, 435
her parents died within a short time of each other, and Dolly had to face a hard, cruel world alone. She discovered that she had a fairly good voice, mellow and husky and she toyed with the idea of show business. First she started with that old theatre of African jazz, the Street. At that time Sophiatown was different from what it is now. It looked more or less like a country dorp. People were still planting peach and apricot trees in their backyards. In fact, one of Dolly’s great pastimes was to pinch peaches from the backyards of other people. And when she and her young friends had made a good haul they would go to Makouviei‐a waste dump just outside Sophiatown, near Waterval—make a feast of it, and start jitterbugging. Jitterbug held the place then that is held by jive now. They would hop around and kick their legs out to the rhythm of some catchy tune. It is about his time that Dolly discovered that she had a way of stitching a tune to the rhythm of their dancing. Of course, nobody at that time thought that Dolly had the voice to coo the blues through the hearts of a thousand stage‐goers. To her friends she was just a boyish little kid who talked gruffly and sang just as gruffly the hits that went by. But all agree that she was a naughty child, “very, very impossible,” as one of her teachers describes her. She was fond of pulling chairs from under other children, putting nails or drawing pins on their sitting places, attaching “Kick Me” notices to their behinds and she got a great thrill from watching their pained reactions. Still, at this time she did not consider boys as lovers. She thought of them and treated them as pals. Oddly enough, she rather liked them. She liked their rough‐riding, rollicking sense of fun. She gamboled with them, pushed them around, got pushed around, played the African version of hide‐and‐seek called Blikmampatte with them. Somehow in this wild young life she met Jeff. He was the direct opposite to Dolly. Quiet, dignified, halting of speech, shy, studious, well‐shaved. But they fell in love. That was Dolly’s earliest crush. She loved him with a wild, reckless abandon. “Jeff had something, Can. 436
He represented everything that in my secret moments I dreamed, hoped, yearned to become. I should have known that I wasn’t made like that. For me life has always been too raw, too rough, too full of fun and trigger‐quick happiness. And I have little time for gushing, sentimental spurts in human affairs. I have learned early enough to be tough and grabbling about the things I want from life. But Jeff. . . Jeff. . . dearest Jeff. . . Unfortunately Jeff was just a flitting lightning flash. Sophiatown has never been a comfortable home for sweet‐easy love affairs. The strong man filibuster met Dolly as she was going home from ____ For a time it was thrilling to be a strong‐man’s moll. The other girls envied her, the other men laid off, and she could go to shows and movies when she liked, unmolested, uninterfered with. But too soon it began to pull. Dolly discovered that many people she would have liked to accept her began to look askance at her. It wasn’t quite the thing to be known as a gangster’s girl. Moreover, Hasie was beginning to become jealously possessive. She couldn’t even talk to other men, and Dolly who loved life and the dynamics of vital men, started to feel stifled. But it wasn’t easy to break away from a strong‐
man, least of all a touchy guy like Hasie. It had to take death—swift, brutal bloody death‐to slit the unhappy love affair. Like all strong‐men, Hasie had made many enemies. One afternoon he went with a handful of friends of Alexandra on a nice‐
time spree. They had more than a couple of drinks and Hasie started throwing his weight around. That gave his enemies just the break they wanted. They staged a quarrel and a fight broke out. Hasie got stabbed and died even before he got back home. That released Dolly from her affair with him. 437
There were, however, many other young love‐lorn lads who were gasping for Dolly in secret anguish. But they didn’t quite have the guts to go up to her and declare their hearts to her Allison Mhlongo, lately a respectable teacher in the now dead S t. Peter’s Secondary School, Rosettenville, in Johannesburg, has once lamented to me: “The trouble with Dolly Rathebe at this prank‐playing stage of her life is that she was an Chapter 35 The Africanists And The Congress by Dan Tloome [In the first of a series of articles Dan Tloome discusses the “inverted racialism” of the Africanists, their use of the “Big Lie” and the charge that ‘the Congress of Democrats dominates and controls the African National Congress.’] Two leaders of the “Africianist” sect have recently been expelled from the African National Congress. Congress membership has, on the whole, warmly welcomed these expulsions, feeling that it was high time something was done to draw the line between legitimate criticism and open disruption. Some people, however, may feel that Congress should be more tolerant of dissidents. These people may change their minds if they consider what the Africanists themselves actually have to say. 438
I have before me a copy of “The Africanist” for June/July 1958 which must be presumed to put forward the official views of this sect. Insofar as they have views and arguments, of course, these must be met fairly and reasonably discussed. The whole tone and content of “The Africanist”, however, makes it impossible to deal with their arguments calmly and dispassionately, for the thing is saturated from cover to cover with the most venomous abuse and slander. From three pages of “The Africanist”, I select the following terms used to describe the present leadership of the African National Congress: “Lackeys of foreign ideologicities (sic); “discreated” (sic); “pur‐
blind”—(p. 11) “Stooges”; “faithful servants of white dominion”; “robots and megaphones”—(p. 12) “A careerist clique”; “hirelings”; “cranks and touts of white liberals”—(p. 13). The Congress of Democrats is politely described as the “Curse of Democracy”, and “New Age” as its “business journal” (p. 1). The fact that the leaders against whom they direct these unbridled allegations are in the front‐line of fire of Nationalist Party repression; that most of them have for the past eighteen months, as a direct result of their fight for African freedom, been facing the most serious of charges in the treason trial; that their courage and dignity in this trial have won them the admiration and respect of most of South Africa and indeed the whole world; that they have proved in deeds and not in words their high‐minded devotion to their principles, sacrificing their careers and liberty, risking their all—these things mean nothing to the scribes of “The Africanist”, hiding safely behind a screen of anonymity. 439
The Big Lie Have the Africanists anything to offer besides cheap and vulgar abuse of the Congress leaders? Yes, they have lies. Big lies and little lies, lies f a truly breathtaking audacity. They seem to have studied Hitler’s dictum that no matter how far‐fetched the lie you tell‐the bigger lie said, the better—if you only repeat it loud enough and often enough, people will begin to accept it for truth. The biggest and favourite lie of “The Africanist” repeated over and over ad nauseum in this issue, is that the African National Congress is not an independent body; that its policy is decided by others, and specifically, “that C.O.D. controls and dominates the A.N.C.” the charge is made, with varying degrees of scurrility, throughout the magazine. It is, in fact, the main propaganda theme of the Africanist group, their trademark and slogan. The first thing to be said about it is that it is utterly and demonstrably false. For many years now, the African National Congress has as everybody knows, adopted the practice of joining forces with other organizations in struggles and campaigns of common concern. Even before the famous “Xuma‐Dado Pact” of 1946, Congress, especially in the Transvaal, had been cooperating on specific issues with other organizations. One recalls the anti‐pass campaign; the founding conference of the African Mine Workers’ Union, and the great VE Day demonstration in Johannesburg. With June 26, 1950, and then the Defiance Campaign of 1952, planned and undertaken jointly with the S.A. Indian Congress, the A.N.C. took a big step forward in building a united front. Some older and more conservative Congressites went 440
into the venture with misgivings, but most of these were overcome by the brilliant success of the Campaign itself. (Even “The Africanist” is compelled to acknowledge this fact. “The stocks of the A.N.C. sky‐
rocketed,” it writes. “A disciplined grim struggle was carried on . . .”) Alliance It is important to understand the reasons both for these misgivings and why they were overcome. The African liberation movement had never lacked its well‐
intentioned advisers among non‐members, and especially among Europeans. They flourished among liberal circles, in the Race Relations Institute, Joint Councils, “Natives Representatives” and so on. Their advice was always the same: they counseled “patience”, “restraint”, “moderation”—in other words, a “hamba kahle” policy. Africans noticed that those of their leaders who were much influenced by these “friends of the Natives” were always on the Right in any discussions about action, over‐cautious, pouring cold water on militancy. Not unnaturally, militant Congressmen were justifiably suspicious of these outside influences. They demanded that Congress should be a fully independent body, whose members should have the sole right to lay down policy for the organization. And this was an absolutely correct and healthy demand. But there was also another, far from healthy, element that crept in. The ruling circles in this country preach a doctrine, open or concealed, of some sort of clash of fundamental interests between the various nationalities of our country. This racialist doctrine is variously known as “preserving White civilization”, “segregation”, “trusteeship” or “apartheid.” It is, basically, and in the last analysis, a thoroughly false and mischievous ideology. It serves not only to maintain the African and other non‐White peoples in servitude and 441
oppression, but also to cheat and deceive the majority of the Whites themselves, blinding them to their real long‐term interests, and turning them, for the sake of ephemeral privileges, into tools of the big moneyed interests and cheapjack politicians who really run the country. Inverted Racialism Now some Africans swallow this fake theory, hook, line and sinker. Even when they emancipate their minds to the extent of joining Congress, they still cannot free themselves of the racialist ideology of “White South Africa.” All they do is modify it, turn it upside down. They continue to accept the phony categories, White” and “Black”. And so these upside‐down racialists are only able to think of replacing White domination” with “Black domination.” Their vision does not extend to a South Africa freed altogether from the curse of racialism, where no political significance or legal differentiation attaches to the nationality or origin of those citizens who make up the citizens of South Africa. They think of Congress as a body hostile to all non‐Africans. Hence, to such people, the mere idea of Congress co‐operating with other, non‐African, organizations is absurd, even treacherous. They Got Out When Congress began its new course of co‐operating on an equal basis, first with the S.A.I.C., and later with other organizations as well, many of those who had at first been wary of such alliances out of fear that this would compromise the independence of the A.N.C., discovered that their fears were groundless. That where people work together for the same objectives, on a basis of mutual respect and confidence, a fraternity grows up which has no room for unworthy thoughts of “domination”, or the one “using” the other. With a great 442
common goal, and a bitter common foe, all contributions and constructive suggestions are welcome no matter from whom they come. As for those who opposed “on principle” (the racialist principle) all co‐operation between the A.N.C. and democratic groups of non‐Africans, many of them got out of Congress altogether to form breakaway and splinter groups like the so‐
called “National‐minded bloc”. And in so doing, they forfeited all respect and following among the masses of African people. For, with their sound political instinct, the ordinary African working people show a far higher maturity than the parlour politicians and shebeen intellectuals. The people know what they want—freedom, equality, a living wage—and they understand perfectly well that if people of Indian, Coloured or European origin are prepared to come forward, honestly and without reservations, as allies in the struggle for these things, such friendship must be welcomed with both hands. The people have endorsed and confirmed the course of the African National Congress of building a democratic alliance, a united front of militant struggle against apartheid and “White baasskap.” The proof is that never before in its history has Congress enjoyed such mass support and status as it has during the past decade in which that alliance has been built. Those politicians who stood for a policy of narrow racialism and isolationism, whether in the so‐called “national‐minded bloc”, or the “Bantu Congress”, or the present “Africanists” have without exception been repudiated and rejected by the people. And even “The Africanist” pays unwilling tribute to this fact. Although practically every page shouts that the Congress leadership is “discredited”, have “lost the confidence of the people” etc., etc., the Editorial grumbles that “the African masses most of them blind followers of the present leadership defended their programme.” 443
A European Organization There have been many attempts in the past to build up a common front of the oppressed people of our country, to win freedom and equality: one notable effort was the “Non‐European United Front” which, led by Dr. Dadoo and others, flourished in the late thirties. When in the course of the Defiance Campaign the alliance between the major organizations of the African and Indian people was cemented in common endeavour and sacrifice, it seemed that this concept, the dream for many years of the best and clearest political thinkers in the country, had come far towards realization. True, an important element was missing. A major section of the oppressed population, the Coloured people—through individuals amongst them had volunteered—was lacking from the united front. Their oldest organization, the A.P.O., had been wrecked from top to bottom by Coloured counterparts of the Africanists (who would do the same to Congress if they every got the chance to seize control of it.) No Coloured organization existed apart from the arrogant little clique associated with “The Torch” newspaper, whose “boycott everything” policy proved in practice to mean only boycotting the Congress movement and every struggle it initiated. And—what about the Europeans? Many had expressed their solidarity and admiration during the defiance campaign. Although without any organization which could enroll them as disciplined volunteers, a few such as Patrick Duncan and Betty du Toit, had actually been jailed as defiers. How did they fit into the picture? It was here that the leaders of the African National Congress displayed a statesmanship and political wisdom rising far above the narrow race‐colour confines in which official South Africa seeks to imprison our thinking. This was not a clash of races, they declared, but a clash of principle. The Nationalist and United Parties declared that 444
“White Supremacy” was in the interests of that section of our population (the second largest in the country) which is of European descent and they tried to give substance to this thesis by granting them various concessions and privileges. But in fact it was a lie. No nation or group which oppresses others can ever itself be free—or as Olive Schreiner put it, you cannot hold a man down in a witch without getting down in there with him. “White South Africa” was as much the prisoner of the Baasskap State as anyone else—and suffered a good deal more moral degradation than the unfortunate victims. The Congress aim of equality was in the true and fundamental interests of the Europeans, as well as of the Non‐European majority. What was needed then, was an organization which would have the will and the courage to go forth and preach these basic if unpopular home truths among the Europeans themselves: an organization of genuinely democratic Europeans prepared to join as an equal partner in the growing Congress alliance. Armed with these undeniable conclusions, Congress went ahead to put them into practice. It took the bold and unprecedented step of calling a meeting of Europeans who had expressed their sympathy, and there called upon them to form an organization which would work for the Congress principles of freedom and equality among their own people. One section present at the meeting asked whether Congress insisted on a policy of full equality, or whether it would not be satisfied with, for example, a qualified franchise. They were told by Mr. Tambo, on behalf of the A.N.C., that nothing less than full equality would be acceptable, and they thereupon went their own way—a way which need not concern us here, as it is irrelevant to this article. The remainder of those present declared their unqualified support for the policy of the African National Congress. And 445
they went ahead to form the organization now known as the Congress of Democrats. Such was the genesis of the organization which has become the main target of the Africanists’ curses and slanders. It was formed at the instance and on the initiative of the A.N.C. Since its formation it has acted as a loyal partner in the Congress alliance, which has since been joined by the S.A. Coloured Peoples’ Organization, and the Congress of Trade Unions. The Congress of Democrats has campaigned among Europeans on every major issue affecting the African people—group areas and Western Areas removal, bus boycotts, passes for women, higher wages and a host of others, a hard and often thankless task. Though a small organization, it has pulled its weight in every Congress campaign At present many leaders of the Congress of Democrats are sitting, side by side with their colleagues of the sister organizations, in the treason court. At no time has the Congress of Democrats, or any other partner in t he alliance, sought to impose its will on the sister organizations. There is an unwritten law in the alliance—that none of the allies should intervene in the internal affairs of the others. And at no time as the Congress of Democrats, or any other partner, broken this law. So much the, for the general allegations of the Africanists. They are baseless, malicious fabrications. But what about the specific allegations? What about the statement that the Congress of Democrats had Madzunya and Leballo expelled? What about their statements regarding New Age? What about their criticisms of the Freedom Charter? What about their slogan of “Africa for the Africans” and their other arguments? Why do they talk and behave like that, anyway? And what must be done about them? 446
All these questions need replied. I have used up all my space now, but I shall return to them in my next article. [The first article in this series dealt with African National Congress co‐
operation with other bodies; the slander of so‐called Congress of Democrats domination of the A.N.C.; and the “inverted racialism’ of the Africanists. This month the writer discussed the Leballo‐Madzunya expulsions, Africanist attacks on ‘NEW AGE’, and opposition to the Freedom Charter under cover of a false slogan.] There are two sorts of lie. Some lies are believed b those who tell them, because they are ignorant. For example, when a Nationalist politician gets up at the U.N. General Assembly and tells the world that the “Bantu” in South Africa are quite happy and contented and support apartheid, he may well imagine, in his ignorance and prejudice, that he is telling the truth. Similarly, when the “Africanists” keep repeating that the African National Congress is being “dominated” by the much smaller Congress of Democrats they are merely repeating a silly slander begun two years ago by Jordan Ngubane—and squashed pretty effectively by Chief Lutull at that time. If they actually believe this nonsense they are stupid and ignorant, but not necessarily dishonest. But there is a second sort of lie which cannot possibly be believed by the person who tells it: because it involves a matter of fact, not of opinion, and because he has invented it himself. Inability to distinguish between this sort of lie and the truth is a mark not of ignorance but of insanity. In the absence of a medical certificate of lunacy, we must assume that a person who publishes such statements is a deliberate liar, dishonest with the intention to deceive. 447
A remarkable example of such a lie appears in “The Africanist” for June/July 1958, in an article headed “Africanist Statement”, dealing with the summary expulsion of Messrs. Madzunya and Leballo. The article states (p. 6) that the National Working Committee of the A.N.C. was “instructed” to expel these two by a “committee.” “We know” says this statement issued by the Africanists” that this committee “was composed of eight (8) Europeans, three (3) Indians and four (4) Africans. We also know that of these Africans only two voted for the expulsion.” The Facts of the Expulsion Now, the anonymous “we” who issued this “Africanist Statement could not possibly “know” who was on the “committee” which they say “instructed” the A.N.C. to expel their two friends, or how the voting went, for the simple reason that there is not and never was any such committee. This is not the sort of statement which can be excused by ascribing it to ignorance or mistaken opinions. It is a pure invention. The decision to expel Madzunya and Leballo was taken by the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress following a lengthy post‐election review covering, among other matters, the setbacks of National Protest Week and the role played by certain Congress members therein. It can hardly be said that these expulsions came as a surprise. Both of these men, as leaders of the “Africanist” sect, had for a long time been openly and publicly flouting established Congress policy, particularly with regard to the Alliance and the Freedom Charter. In fact they had practically been asking for expulsion, and many Congress members had long been demanding that the leadership take action against them. The “Africanist’s” open sabotage of the stay‐at‐home campaign was the last straw; it overcame the understandable reluctance of the N.E.C. to use disciplinary sanctions as long as there may be a hope of saving individuals for the 448
movement and led to a unanimous decision for their summary expulsion. Obviously, the N.E.C. did not need any “instructions” to expel these strike‐breakers. The men who have been elected to the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress have been put there because they have earned a reputation of fearless and uncompromising opposition to White Supremacy. They have not hesitated to face police violence, deportation, prison, victimization in the cause of African rights and freedom. Yet the “Africanists” ask us to believe that men like this take “instructions” about Congress matters from others who are not members of the A.N.C.! “The Africanists” says the Committee which decided the expulsion of Leballo and Madzunya was composed of Europeans, Indians and Africans. Now the only committee where national A.N.C. representatives ever meet Indians and Europeans to discuss matters of common concern is the National Consultative Committee (the N.C.C.). Because the N.C.C. consists of representatives of all five organizations it could not possibly have had the composition described by “The Africanist.” But leaving that aside, and more importantly, it could not possibly have “instructed” the A.N.C. to expel anyone— 1. Because, as a consultative body, the N.C.C., cannot issue “instructions” to any of the constituent bodies; it can only advise, and then only on matters of common concern; 2. Because the N.C.C. cannot and does not ever discuss or consider the internal and domestic concern of any of the Congresses. In order to grasp this point fully, we should recall the fundamental nature of what for convenience we often call “the Congress 449
movement”, which is in reality not a single organization at all, but a voluntary free alliance of several perfectly distinct and autonomous and independent bodies. But I shall return to this point later. “New Age” and the Congress of Democrats The Editorial in “The Africanist” refers to “New Age as “the business journal of the firm of C.O.D.” This, I suppose, is meant to be insulting, but the insult is so far‐fetched as to be hardly worth consideration. If the term “business journal” implies that the object of “New Age” is to make money it is so far removed from the plain facts as to make the angels weep. Everybody with the slightest knowledge of South African realities knows perfectly well that “New Age” appearing practically without advertising revenue, the mainstay of every other newspaper, only manages to keep up publication by some sort of miracle, by the self‐
sacrificing voluntary financial support of readers of the paper. The talented journalists and overworked administrative staff of the “New Age” are, without exception, making personal sacrifices to work on the paper, accepting salaries well below what they would expect from any purely commercial undertaking, and on to of it facing the continuing and very real danger of state and police victimization every day of their lives. If ever there was a paper which no one in his senses could possibly call “a business journal, that paper is “New Age.” There is no paper in South Africa which is so much loved and respected by the downtrodden and oppressed people as “New Age” Why? Because, like the papers which went before it and which were banned, “New Age” has consistently exposed the crimes and 450
misdeeds of the South African Government against the voteless majority of the people. It has fought against low wages and pass laws and group areas and Bantu Education. It has stood side by side with the people in every struggle: in the bus boycotts and the rural struggles and in every one of the trials and tribulations of the Congress movement. Although it is not and never has been an official Congress organ, there is not a single loyal and sincere Congressite who does not appreciate and value what this paper has done and is doing for the movement and the people. By their cheap sneers at “New Age”, the “Africanists” expose themselves as assistants, willing or unwilling of the oppressors. It is not true that “New Age” is the organ of the Congress of Democrats. It is an independent newspaper. Certainly it supports the policy of the Congress movement. It gives more information about Congress activities than any other newspaper. If one reads the paper regularly one cannot help being struck by the fact that in proportion very little appears as a rule, about the Congress of Democrats. By far the greatest amount of space is devoted to the activities and statements of the African National Congress. This fact is not very remarkable, for the A.N.C. is, of course a much bigger and stronger organization. It would be hardly worth mentioning, but for the unwarranted slurs of “The Africanist.” The Dirty Stick So far, I have been dealing with some of the more gross mis‐
statements of fact which the “Africanists” keep repeating, and which I am sorry to see are thoughtlessly taken up by the United Party press and even by elements within the Liberal Party, who seem anxious to find any stick with which to beat Congress—even if the stick is so dirty that it is bound to soil their hands. 451
It is not a very pleasant task to have to wade through and reply to these conscienceless fabrications. Nevertheless, it has to be done. Many new members and supporters of the Congress movement do not know the truth about these matters. If people are not award of the facts they will swallow mis‐statements which are repeated over and over again, unless those who know the truth are prepared to expose the lies and nail them in public for all to see. An Africanist ‘Ideology’? The “Africanists” do not restrict themselves to spreading far‐fetched slanders about inter‐Congress relationships. They claim to have an “ideology”. This so‐called ideology finds its clearest expression in their abuse of the Freedom Charter, which they refer to contemptuously as “the Kliptown Charter”, which they say “emanated from the Vodka Cocktail parties of Parktwon and Loer Houghton.” They profess to find some conflict between the Charter and the resolution (the Programme of Action) adopted at the A.N.C. Conference in December 1949. They keep repeating that the present Congress leadership has “abandoned” the 1949 resolution. A detailed examination of their allegations against the Charter of the alleged conflict between the Charter and the Programme of Action, and of the steps taken by Congress to implement the 1949 programme, will show that the “Africanists” case is as untrustworthy and ill‐founded in the field of ideas as I have already proved it to be in the field of facts. “Africa for the Africans” The main complaint of the “Africanists” against the Freedom Charter is the profound and challenging statement with which it opens: “That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White.” 452
The “Africanists” deny that they are racialists. But, in fact, their attitude towards this clause of the Charter shows beyond doubt that they are racialists that they are unable to emancipate their minds from the petty racial confines in which the ideologists of apartheid and “White domination” seek to imprison all of us. They claim that the Preamble to the Charter is contrary to the slogan (which although they “claim” it, was not invented by them and does not belong to them) “Africa for the Africans.” It is time some fresh thinking and analysis was applied to this slogan. Slogans are not Bible texts; they must not be treated as shibboleths which are holy and sacrosanct for all time and in all contexts, otherwise we shall not be rational political thinkers but mystics and mumbo‐jumbo men. In a certain sense and in a certain context, “Africa and the Africans” is a sound, militant and correct slogan. The continent of Africa is and has for a long time been the prey of foreign sharks, financiers and exploiters who have seized its natural resources and even its people, by force and by fraud, who have planted alien flags and administrations, carved up the continent among themselves, and sent their garrisons and settlers here to lord it over us and exploit our labour. When we say “Africa for the Africans” with a view to the Continent as a whole, we mean of course that this wicked and unjust state of affairs must come to a speedy end, that the peoples of this Continent must—as is already happening in some parts of it, and as has already happened in most of Asia—have restored to them their inherent human right of self‐government and enjoyment of their own natural resources. When we cry: “African for the Africans!” we are demanding that foreign powers, like Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal must quit 453
Africa and allow its people to conduct their own affairs. We mean that the land and natural resources which have been seized b these imperialist powers must be restored to their rightful owners. We mean that no special rights and privileges should be conceded to aliens in this continent And these are all legitimate and proper demands. But we cannot take this legitimate and proper general slogan and turn it into a sort of magical formula which is going to solve all of the problems of each of the countries and territories of this vast continent And when people try to use the slogan in a purely racial sense, as the Africanists want to do, they destroy the value of the slogan and obscure its meaning. For, applied to particular countries, the slogan becomes, for example, “Ghana for the Ghanians!” or “Nigeria for the Nigerians!” Quite correct. And—South Africa for the South Africans! And—who are the South Africans? They are the people who live in this county, who have made it their home, and who know no other home. It is true, and most regrettable so that one section of the population through the imposition of a wicked and unjust form of government and social structure, dominates the rest, secures to itself a monopoly of all political, economic and other rights and privileges, and seeks to make the African, Coloured and Indian majority outcasts, pariahs and aliens in their own country. It is precisely this wicked system and these unjust privileges and monopolies which the Freedom Charter challenges and seeks to eradicate. But the people of South Africa do not want to destroy one form of injustice, one form of racialism, and replace it with another. To do so would fatally weaken the overwhelming moral justice of our cause—and also make it infinitely more difficult if not impossible of realization. 454
That is why the Freedom Charter makes it quite clear that by South Africans we mean all the people who live here, Black and White. Through this clear formulation, the Charter makes it plain, once and for all, that we who support it fight for universally accepted human rights, not for narrow sectional privileges. We cut the ground from under the feet of those so‐called Nationalists—whether of the Afrikaner or “Africanist” variety—who are so obsessed by differences of nationality that they can see nothing in our country but the “clash of race and colour.” That is why both of them hate the Charter so much. I call them so‐called Nationalists because they are not really Nationalists at all. A real South African Nationalist would be one who strives to build a real South African nation. But the tribalists and racialists, whether of the Swart‐Verwoerd variety or the Leballo‐
Madzunya variety, do not want to do this at all. They want to keep our various population groups apart to accentuate their differences and hostilities. The touchstone of a true South African patriot is his attitude to the Charter. (In his next article, Mr. Tloome deals with further “Africanist” criticisms of the Freedom charter, and analyses “the myth of the 1949 Programme of Action.”) The Freedom Charter and the 1949 Programme of Action The previous two articles in this series dealt with African National Congress co‐operation with other bodies, the slander of so‐called Congress of Democrats domination of the ANC, the “inverted racialism” of the Africanists, and the Madzunya‐Leballo expulsions. 455
The “Africanists” hate the Freedom Charter as much as the Nationalist Government does. The great majority of Congress members, who support the Charter, they refer to contemptuously as “Charterists”. They describe this noble document, which has won world‐wide admiration for the clarity of its language and presentation, and which sums up the demands and aspirations of countless thousands of South Africans, as a “catalogue” of “ill‐
digested ideas and ill‐defined statements.” Yet apart from their objection to the statement that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”—an objection which merely, as I have shown, exposes their own naked chauvinism—what is it that they really object to in the Charter? We may look for the answer in an article in “The Africanist” which claims, not very modestly, to be a “penetrative study and critical analysis.” As usual the article starts off with the sort of ranting and nonsensical abuse which is the trade mark of the Africanists. Pretending to describe who was at the Congress of the People, it says: “The Whites who were at Kliptown, from the Special Branch, were mainly members of the Congress of Democrats.” Can you believe it? These people, who are persecuted day and night by the Special Branch, who have their homes raided, their telephone tapped, their letters opened, who are banned, arrested, vilified, victimized by the Special Branch—
the “Africanists” tell us they were “from the Special Branch.” Who will believe them? Only political simpletons and people who are as crazy as themselves. And what was their purpose at Kliptown—
where they voted for the most radical manifesto in the history of our country? “They are in reality concerned with the maintenance of the “status quo,” says “The Africanist.” Rather a strange way, isn’t it, to “maintain the status quo!” 456
The members of the S.A. Indian Congress who were at the Congress of the People are described as “the Merchant Class,” as “an exploiting alien group.” The African leaders present, we are told, “were mainly elements receiving economic benefits from the ‘Marshall Aid Plan of the C.OD. and the S.A.I.C.” None of the allegations or imputations is evenly remotely true. All of them have the same purpose—to prejudice the mind of the reader against the text of the Charter. For when it comes down to the actual text the critics have surprisingly little to say that is either intelligible or worth saying. Looking for Points They do not like the formulation “That no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.” Why? It should have said “the will of the majority.” But, as a matter of historical fact, all the great democratic documents, including the French and American declarations of the rights of man, say that government should be derived from the will of the people. Why, in South Africa, should we specify “all the people?” Precisely because the concept “will of the people” (or volkswil) has been narrowed down to imply a privileged minority which has a monopoly of democratic rights. Either the Africanists just don’t’ understand this, or—more likely, they are just looking for points.” They say they do not agree that the people “have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality.” What, you may wonder, could anyone who pretends to be an African patriot and a democrat find to object to in this formulation? Do they think South Africans have no birthright to land or liberty or peace? Do they think our government is founded on justice and equality? No, the gentlemen raise no such objections. They say the Charter should have said, rather, “The African people have been robbed by the European people.” They think (what 457
a petty quibble!) the word “freedom” should have been used instead of the synonym “liberty.” Well, in the first place, let me say that the Charter should not have said anything of the sort. The “European people” as a whole have not been the robbers, but the minority of imperialists, land‐grabbers and exploiters among them: most of them do not themselves possess land, liberty or peace, and never will until the New South Africa envisaged in the Charter has been won. The merit of the Charter is that it exposes this great central truth of our country and enables us to see the struggle as it really is, under its outward forms, as one of the great majority of the people, White as well as Black, against a wicked form of government—not, as the Nationalists, whether of the Verwoerd or Leballo variety would like us to see it, as a clash between White and Black. A Common Programme Let me add to that, that persons with any pretence to intellectual integrity cannot take a document like the Freedom Charter, a broad common programme meant to unite all the democratic forces in the country, and attack it not for what it says but for what it does not say. The Charter is not and is not meant to be a programme for the African National Congress alone, or for the Congress of Democrats, or the trade unions. It is not meant to be a programme for the right, or the left, or the centre, for workers or peasants or businessmen or intellectuals alone. It is, and is meant to be, a common programme for all these elements, omitting those questions which we disagree about, which divide us, and outlining those minimum demands which we can all agree are ESSENTIAL for the building of a democratic South Africa. An African nationalist, for example, might feel that in certain directions the Charter does not go far enough, that as a programme for African nationalism it is inadequate. Nevertheless, if he is a genuine African patriot, he will recognize that its realization will 458
carry our people a long stride forward; he will gladly and unreservedly accept the Charter, therefore, as a basis of co‐operation with philosophy. If he does not do this he merely exposes himself, as do our “Africanists” as not a patriot, but a disruptive and mischievous person who in fact harms African freedom instead of advancing it. Again, to take another example, a Socialist might also find the Charter quite inadequate as a statement of his aims and outlook. He might feel that as it does not call for socialism it cannot solve the long‐term problems of the country. Nevertheless, he should recognize that the abolition of discrimination and national oppression, as demanded by the Charter, will mean an immeasurable step forward for our country, and will liberate the energies and minds of the people from their grim preoccupation with “racial” problems, to tackle the great social problems ahead. Wide of the Mark It is precisely because they do not even begin to grasp this concept of the Charter as a broad unifying basis for the alliance of all the progressive and healthy elements in South Africa that the so‐called “Africanists” criticisms are so wide of the mark. In fact, when it comes to the demands of the Charter itself they are unable to find a single one which they are able openly to object to; for if they did so they would finally expose themselves as obvious reactionaries and upholders of White supremacy. In a five‐page “analysis” of the Charter (supposed to be “penetrative”) there are four direct (out‐of‐context) quotations from the Charter itself. The rest consists of abuse. When the Charter says “The People Shall Govern” they do not say “We disagree with this”; they say that the Congress movement does not really mean it, it really means that the people must carry out “directives” from the top leaders and their lackeys and flunkeys.” 459
With this sort of swindling argument one cannot really carry out a reasoned debate at all. Here is the Charter, gentlemen, it speaks for itself; tell us what you think is wrong with it. But they do not really tell us what they think is wrong with it; they merely swear at us and tell us we do not mean what we say! The Myth of the 1949 Programme The “Africanists” keep on saying that they stand by the “Programme of Action” adopted by the A.N.C. Conference in 1949. They suggest that this document is somehow in conflict with the Charter and the Alliance, and moreover that the A.N.C. leadership has failed. Both suggestions are false. The 1949 Programme is not, like the Freedom Charter, a comprehensive list of concrete demands, but a plan of work for Congress. Thus the two documents are quite different in character. The 1949 Programme, however, does start out by announcing certain principles and demands, such as the rejection of “White domination, the right to direct representation in all governing bodies, abolition o differential political institutions, higher wages, education etc. Every single one of these demands and principles is fully covered by relevant sections of the Freedom Charter. Considered as a plan of work—and it was a very ambitious one—most of the important tasks proposed in the Programme of Action have been carried out by the Congress leadership during the intervening years in a manner which many of those present at that Conference ten years ago would hardly have dreamed possible. Congress was then, after all, a comparatively small organization, without much mass influence. When it decided upon “boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience,” and 460
“preparations” for a one‐day national stoppage of work, many people must have thought that this was just “big talk.” Yet when we look back at the past decade of struggle at the Transvaal and National strikes of 1950, at the historic Defiance Campaign, at all the boycotts, campaigns and forms of action which Congress has initiated and carried out in the intervening period, which have built up the A.N.C. to a position of prestige, strength and influence previously unknown and placed it at the head of a great multi‐racial movement fighting for democracy in the teeth of the most terrible persecution and tyranny this country has ever known—we shall realize that the leadership has carried out the 1949 Programme with honour and credit. These have not been as the Africanists maintain, years of failure. They have been years of great and proud achievement: the greatest, thus far, in the history of Congress and the prelude to a yet greater decade ahead. The 1949 Programme is of great historic interest and importance, as marking a turning point from former, useless methods, to a new period of militancy and mass action. Yet, like all plans of work and programmes of action, it was right in those circumstances and at that time, but it was not and could not be meant for all circumstances and all time. The Natives’ Representative Council, which it set to boycott, and now has been abolished by the Government, and similar institutions are fast being replaced by the even more undemocratic “Bantu Authorities in country and in town. It proved impossible to set up educational centres, as envisaged in the programme, ten years ago; it is even more impossible today, under Bantu Education, when even Catholic mission schools are being closed. New Era—New Needs 461
We are approaching 1959. It is a new era. Under the Prime Ministership of Dr. Verwoerd, a time of increased taxes, of passes for women, of eve new trials and persecutions, bans and threats of more bans, the outlawing of Congress in certain areas, and the threat of further illegalization, we face a future of new, bitter and relentless struggles, with new problems, new conditions, new tasks. The 1949 Plan is no longer adequate for our needs; though we must preserve and extend its uncompromising and militant spirit in the new programmes of action that the present times call for. In these bitter struggles we cannot afford, within our own ranks, to harbour a malicious Fifth Column, which is ever anxious to magnify and inflame any disagreement or misunderstanding which arises among us; whose weapons are lies and poisoned slanders; which absorbs our energies in barren and fruitless disputes and quarrels; which brings techniques of gangsterism and rowdyism into our own meetings and conferences, which the Government is making it more and more difficult to hold at all; which disregards every rule of Congress discipline and fair debate. We can deal with the Government’s attempts to smash Congress. We know why they make these attempts, and how to defeat them. It is far more difficult to deal with those who seek to smash Congress from within, using the name and adopting the outward colours of Congressmen. How are we to deal with these people? Why are they receiving the support of certain Liberals and Chamber of Mines newspapers like the “World”? Can we really tolerate them within Congress, or regard them as part of Congress any longer? These are the questions I propose to answer in the next, and final, article in this series. EXIT THE AFRICANISTS 462
The fourth and concluding article in the series. During the time in which these articles have been appearing, a dramatic change has taken place in the fortunes of the “Africanist” clique and its struggle against the policy and leadership of the African National Congress. That change took place at the Transvaal Provincial Conference of the A.N.C. on November 9, 1958, when following their repudiation by the majority of delegates and members, and the determined repulsion of their plans to disrupt the conference by force the members of the clique, headed b the expelled ex‐Congressmen Madzuny and Leballo, withdrew from the Conference and announced their intention of founding a new organization. The walk‐out was accompanied by a blare of publicity. In fact, few of those who declared they were “seceding” were really Congress members. Many of those who marched out of the Orlando Communal Hall were merely gangsters hired for the occasion. Others were members of Madzunya’s private “Congress branch” at Alexandra, which has paid no membership fees to head office for at least a year. Yet the newspapers did not scruple to present the incident as a “major split” in Congress. Headline Sensation The “Sunday Express” told its readers that Madzunya had become the most influential Non‐European leader in the country. A week later the same “influential” leader could hardly gather half a dozen listeners to a meeting he tried to hold in the open air at Alexandra: while nearby a large crowd gathered to attend a meeting called by the local Congress branch. The “Golden City Post” announced in screaming headlines, covering half its front page: “The Big Split is Spreading—NOW THERE ARE 463
TWO A.N.C.s.” The paper “revealed” that “the breakaway by the Africanists is developing into a full‐scale national split—the most convulsive thing which has ever happened in the 46 years existence of the A.N.C.” Excitedly the “Post speculated whether Madzunya, Mothopeng, Raboroko or Sobukwe would be elected president of the “new A.N.C.” Its crypto‐Africanist columnist Matthew Nkoana explained that the Africanists weren’t really anti‐White, just anti‐
Communist. One spokesman of the clique is even quoted by the “Post”, in fat, black capitals, as being of the opinion that the present Congress leadership “would close up shop in the immediate future.” Any readers of the “post” who might have rushed eagerly to buy the paper the following week for more exciting news of “the most convulsive thing in 46 years” were due for a serious disappointment. Supporters from the Cape Natal and the O.F.S. were not flocking to the Africanist colours, as the “Post” had promised. And Congress was by no means “closing up shop”! In fact, it was carrying on steadily organizing the people against oppression and for freedom, as it has done, for the past 46 years, and as it will continue to do until equality and democracy have been won. Congress issues a brief statement describing the departure of the “Africanists as “a good riddance.” It did not seem to be very much worried about the “big split.” With passes for women being issued in Johannesburg there were far more important matters to worry about. A Hot Brick Far more realistic and accurate in its assessment of what had really happened at Orlando was “The World.” All along “The World” had been backing and boosting the “Africanists”, supporting Mr. Madzunya’s ridiculous campaign for presidency of the Transvaal A.N.C. (as if an expelled member could be seriously considered as a candidate for office!) and giving currency to Africanist propaganda 464
against the Congress alliance and the Freedom Charter. All of a sudden, after Orlando, “The World” dropped the “Africanists” like a hot brick. All of a sudden it discovered what everyone else had known all along—that these people were “disruptors.” Has “The World” reformed? Has it decided to stop its old game of trying to stimulate discord in the A.N.C.? Not at all for in the very same breath it claims to have discovered a “new force”—“African nationalists”—
who are going to steer Congress away from its present course of alliance with non‐African democrats. The fact is that “The World”, unlike the “Post”, saw Orlando for what it was: a glaring exposure of the Africanists, a crushing defeat for them, and the end of their role as a public nuisance inside the Congress. And “The World” was furious with them. Inside congress the Africanists could always be a nuisance: “The World” could always pretend they were stronger than they are, the “true voice of the people,” etc. Outside Congress they are useless. Their pitiful weakness and lack of public support will be exposed. “The World” knows. It has been through the whole experience before with its former editor, Mr. Thema, and his ill‐fated “National‐Minded Block.” Political Suicide In this assessment “The World” is right and the “Post” and the “Express” are wrong. At Orlando the “Africanists” committed political suicide. The whole history of anti‐Congress splinter groups, not only the “National‐
Minded but many others as well (and here I would include the sad fate of the All‐African Convention, once it embarked on an anti‐Congress path) indicates that the “Africanists” have put to sea in a leaky vessel which is unlikely to survive the first stiff breeze it encounters. As long as it was merely a question of getting up at a Congress branch meeting or conference and slamming out at the leadership, while carefully avoiding any constructive work, or anything likely to lead to trouble with the police, everything was fine, and these fellows were in their element. But once the have abandoned the shelter given them by the broad shield of Congress, once 465
they aspire to go out before the people and stand up as self‐appointed “leaders”, something more will be expected of them than ranting against President Lutuli, the Congress of Democrats and communism. The people will ask: what is your positive policy, what is your alternative to Congress leadership in all hard and bitter daily struggles, against apartheid and job reservation and low wages and passes: for freedom and equality and democracy? And since these men, mostly embittered and frustrated intellectuals, have never had any real contact with or love for the working people, have never led or even taken part in a genuine people’s struggle, but merely stood by and criticized those who were taking the brunt of those struggles, they will be unable to answer these questions from the people, and the people will turn their backs on them. And since they have only learnt to quarrel and to slander and never to co‐operate and pull together, since they know only how to destroy and not to build it will not be long before they fall to bickering among themselves and any organization they try to create will soon fall to pieces. To the patient reader who has borne with me for so long in this detailed, and not very edifying analysis of this sect who call themselves “Africanists”, it may seem that they are not very important, and that I have spent too much time and space on them already. Yet there are implications in these events which go far beyond this unimportant group. The “Africanists” were never able to muster much support in Congress. At provincial and national conferences they never got more than about half a dozen voices for anti‐Charter and anti‐alliance resolutions. No avowed member of the sect was ever elected to any senior office in Congress. The only times they have ever been able to cause any real trouble in the organization was when they attached themselves to the coat‐tails of some group which had some genuine dispute or misunderstanding with the leadership. Yet certain journals 466
and journalists, outside the A.N.C., have consistently blown up their pretensions to be an “important” force in Congress, and inflated their significance to absurd dimensions. Why? Mind you, I am not speaking here of such a newspaper as “The World” which has been announcing “major splits” in Congress weekly for the last ten years or more, or of the “Golden City Post” which obviously believes that any sort of irresponsible sensationalism is justified. But why should newspapers like the “Sunday Express” and the “Rand Daily Mail” imagine it to be in their interests to boost a rabidly anti‐White sect? Even more strange‐
seeming—why do Liberal Party publicists like Jordan Ngubane of “Indian Opinion” and Patrick Duncan of “Contact”, flatter and pander to these illiberal meeting‐breakers and racialists, and give currency to their slanders against the leadership of the A.N.C., with which the Liberal Party is anxious to co‐operate? Anti‐Communist Phobia An important clue to the solution of these riddles is to be found in the fact that—in addition to their chauvinism, malicious slander‐
mongering and other disorders—the Africanists suffer severely from malignant and obsessive anti‐Communist phobia. Now there are lots of perfectly reasonable, sane people who do not agree with Marxist philosophical outlooks and economic analyses, who indeed challenge them vigorously. Yet they are able to debate such matters rationally and calmly—or would be, were such debates permitted under the present laws of our country. In this they differ markedly from the man who has been bitten by the virus of Communophobia. The Communophobe might be able to talk fairly reasonably on various matters, but the moment his obsession is mentioned reason flies out of the window. He spends his life looking 467
under beds for Reds and inventing monstrous conspiracies instigated from Moscow. When a body like Congress protests against the invasion of Egypt by imperialists, as at the time of Suez, they cannot understand the simple truth: that it is a perfectly ordinary act of African and colonial solidarity. They hint darkly that the protest is all part of a deep‐laid Communist plot. Every simple act of the democratic movement is twisted to have some hidden and sinister significance. The disease is extremely infectious and is rife in the Nationalist arty where Minister of Justice Swart is practically the textbook example of an advanced and incurable case. His ravings about Communists being about o poison water wells and blow up power stations, which precluded and were supposed to justify the Suppression of Communism Act are characteristic symptoms of the mania. It is surely because the Nationalists recognize the Africanists as fellow‐
psychopaths that people like Madzunya are permitted to get up, in the presence of the police, and get away with gross anti‐White incitements such as would earn any other speaker an immediate arrest and conviction under the Riotous Assemblies Act or some other such law. Strange Bed‐fellows Unfortunately the virus also got a hold on certain elements in the South African Liberal Party. Obsessive anti‐Communism, like adversity, makes strange bed‐fellows. It seems almost incredible that the reformists of the Liberal Party should find anything in common with the “Africanist” fire‐eaters. Yet it is because he recognizes the “Africanists” as fellow‐sufferers from Communophobia that a Liberal like Mr. Jordan Ngubane displays such marked sympathy for them. For Mr. Ngubane is indeed a sad case. For years he has been trying to smear Congress with the “red” brush, and he has not stopped yet. There is 468
scarcely a slander spread nowadays by the “Africanists” whose source cannot be found in the sort of things which Mr. Ngubane was writing in 1956. President Lutuli wrote a lengthy, dignified and restrained reply at that time, which tore Ngubane’s flimsy case to ribbons. But that did not deter or restrain him. It is precisely here, on this ground of red‐baiting and malignant Communophobia that the illiberal anti‐Whites of the Africanist sect find themselves on common ground with certain Liberals of “Opinion” and “Contact” and the anti‐Blacks of the Chamber of Mines press. The Africanists, even though they may not recognize this, also find themselves on common ground here with Verwoerd, Swart, Redeemer and Company. Here, indeed, lies the whole weakness of the position of those who try to work the well‐worn anti‐Communist racket in this country. The Nationalists have done it to death. The people have learnt—that the man who comes along to “save them from the Reds” is in fact the man who suppresses not only the Communists, but also the whole of their civil, political, religious, educational, trade union and human rights. The Horse Won’t Run This is something that the Africanists and other political punters who put their money on the broken‐down, discredited hack of anti‐
Communism, should understand. So far as the African people and other democratic elements in South Africa are concerned, this is a horse that definitely won’t run. Congress fought against the Suppression of Communism Act from the start, and it has never accepted that legislative abortion which conflicts with the whole democratic outlook of the liberation movement. The former Communist Party of South Africa, until its dissolution was forced by the Nationalist Government, was traditionally accepted and 469
welcomed as a partner and an ally in the struggle by the African National Congress, even under such conservative leaders as Dr. Xuma and Dr. Moroccan. The late Mr. Mats eke, then Transvaal Congress President, invited the Party to co‐operate with Congress in founding the African Mine Workers’ Union in 1942. In 1943 the A.N.C. invited the party to be a co‐sponsor in the anti‐pass campaign. The Party was a member of the Congress‐led United Front which held the monster V.D. Day demonstration in Johannesburg in 1945. Right up to the day of its dissolution in 1950 the same Party was one of the five‐fold alliance which called the historic June 26 Day of Protest, under former President Moroccan. Those who are really in earnest about the struggle for a democratic South Africa, who regard it as a matter of life and death, will not reject brave and sincere partners who are dedicated to the same goal—whatever differences they may have over philosophical conceptions and ultimate goals. The most urgent task of all South African democrats and patriots, of whatever school of philosophy, is the winning of freedom, the ending of the stifling autocracy which today makes free debate impossible. Afterwards we shall have time, opportunity and occasion to debate the rights and wrongs of socialism. Neither the “Africanists” nor anyone else can succeed today in provoking a split between “Right” and “Left” in Congress. The exodus of the “Africanist” group of noisy disruptors has not in any way weakened the African National Congress. On the contrary, it has strengthened the Congress and the entire democratic movement. Congress is a broad, all‐embracing movement of all African patriots, democrats and fighters for freedom. It can, and will continue to, tolerate within its ranks men and women of many shades of opinion. But, obviously, in the stern struggles of the day, an element of discipline and unity is necessary. Once a majority decision has been 470
taken the minority must fall in line. A minority which does not, which creates its own hostile organization within the movement; which does not scruple to employ vicious slanders, gangster methods and outright sabotage, cannot be tolerated by any serious political movement. No doubt all the Africanists and those influenced by them have not yet quit Congress. Perhaps some members who, in the past, were impressed by their demagogy, will by now have been disgusted by their self‐exposure at Orland and have seen them for what they are—
open anti‐congress disruptors. For such people who are prepared to support the decided and agreed policy of Congress based upon the Charter and the Alliance, I am convinced that there will always be a place in the national organization. But, from now on, it is clear that those who try from within to work on behalf of the hostile, anti‐
Congress organization of the “Africanists” will soon be given their marching orders and told to join their friends outside. Far too much time has been expended on barren controversies wit this sterile and disruptive clique, and Congress has a big job of work to do. And so I have come to the end of this lengthy analysis of the group of so‐called Africanists. I cannot pretend that it has been a pleasant task. Although I have striven to write without rancor or bitterness, one cannot help feeling sad that it has been necessary at this crucial period in the struggle for freedom to devote so much space and time to so barren a sect. Yet I believe it has been necessary, and perhaps not without its lessons for the future. Though the leaders of the “Africanists” have departed, their ghost will no doubt return to haunt Congress in the future. The slanders they spread—the same weary old stories about “domination” of Congress by the Congress of Democrats: the distortions of the Freedom Charter: the smear of red‐
baiting—all will crop up again in the future as they have in the past. And our experiences with the Africanists will help us to deal with such attacks better in the future. 471
What of the “Africanists” themselves? I cannot bring myself to believe that all of them are equally to blame. Let us hope that, with advancing maturity and understanding those who have been misled by the wild allegations and wild talk of this unhealthy sect will return to the broad main road of the struggle for the Freedom Charter and the Alliance for Democracy—the Congress Road. 472
Chapter 36 Satygraha In South Africa by Fatima Meer Satyagraha, a philosophy of non-violent opposition to injustice,
comes to us in an age which has seen the worst forms of human
violence. As a philosophy of social change, it advances the theory
that social reform is dependent wholly on the method used to bring
about reform. It thus denies the possibility of instituting good
through methods of evil, of realizing peace through techniques of
violence, of achieving democratic rights by forms of action hostile to
the spirit of democracy.
The constant use of the name of Mahatma Gandhi, of the word
Satyagraha, and of such terms as civil disobedience, “hartal” and
non-violence in the non-European struggle against racial injustice in
South Africa seems to suggest that the Gandhian concept has had a
lasting impact on our people and is in the process of emerging as a
salient factor in the struggle for democracy in the Union.
Literally translated, the word “Satyagraha” means the demonstration
of a heart firm in the concepts of love and truth. To Gandhi himself,
the author of the word and the philosophy it expressed, it was the
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belief that social change, where necessary, can be effected by the
impact of soul force upon the hearts of those in power.
It is doubtful whether this concept, deeply inspired by religious
beliefs of a universal trend and significantly influenced by the
writings of the Russian philosopher Tolstoy, was adhered to in its
purity by many people other than Gandhi himself and a handful of
his close disciples like Vinoba Bhave. To Nehru, Gandhi’s personally
chosen successor, and to the masses of India, it remained a political
tactic to be utilized for the obtaining of greater political power by a
voiceless people. The Indians of South Africa saw Satyagraha in this
light when, under the leadership of Gandhi, they became the first
people to use the weapon and develop its technique.
Numerically, the Indians constitute the smallest group in the multiracial society of South Africa, representing only 2.9 per cent of her
total population. For the most part, they share with the rest of the
non-European peoples in the country an inescapable existence of
slums, endless overcrowded dwellings and a low resistance to death
and disease. Three-quarters of the Indian breadwinners earn less than
£100 a year with an average family of five dependants to support.
While European politicians utilize the high Indian birth rate to fan
fears of insecurity in the minds of the vote-exercising public, some 5
Indian babies in every 1,000 never survive their first year.
The Indian, alone of the South African peoples, remains voteless.
While some Africans have the ineffective “Native representation”
and the Coloured is to be placed on a communal roll, even the
Opposition United Party which in 1946 had prescribed a from of
dummy representation for Asiatics, has in a recent statement
expressed its complete aversion to the granting of any political rights
to the Indian people. And yet, of all the non-White peoples in South
Africa, it is the Indian community which has within its ranks the
most articulate and powerful economic group—merchants and
professionals who constitute that middle-class so vital to any
suppressed people in its struggle for political rights.
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It is through the unique presence of this class within the ranks of the
non-European people that South African Indians have endured their
peculiar oppression and earned their peculiar history in the
development of the country. For basic to the emergence of the
“Indian problem” is the question of European monopolization of
South Africa’s wealth. As early as 1880, the Indian middle-class
revealed signs of entrenching itself as a non-European group of
economic strength, and from that date onward, European politics
commenced its bitter history of Indian antagonism.
The Indians migrated to Natal in 1860 essentially under the indenture
system and on the clear understanding that complete and full
participation in the citizenship rights of the country would be their
ultimate reward when freed of their contracts.
It was this aspect of the British contract of indenture which allowed
some compensation for the harsh and slave-like conditions of labour
embodied in the agreement. At the time, the Indians held a crucial
potential for increasing the numbers of a White minority which lived
in perpetual fear of an African avalanche. The presence of a Black
people, however, in the urban life of the colony, sharing privileges
equally with the Whites, was a contradiction in a society conceived
for the exclusive benefit of a White pigmentocracy. The theoretical
acceptance of Indian citizenship rights was bound to lead to a
practical rejection as soon as Indians in sufficient numbers gathered
sufficient sophistication to threaten the economic monopoly of the
dominant group.
The breach in the agreement which followed was inevitable, and the
Indian problem emerged as the problem of a White government
seeking constitutional means to whittle away Indian rights and
reduce their status to that of the other non-White peoples.
From 1883 onwards the Indians in Natal and in all the provinces to
which they traveled became subjected to discriminatory legislation.
The Transvaal treated them as pariahs who, on grounds of hygiene,
were to be separated from the European community. The Orange
475
Free State banned them completely from its territory, while in Natal,
restrictions on license applications and severe taxes crippled their
freedom. The poll tax introduced in Natal to resolve the conflict
between industry which depended on Indian labour and commerce
which believed itself outdone by Indian competition, was
exorbitantly high. Equivalent to six months’ salary under indenture,
it applied to all indentured Indian males over the age of 16 and all
females over the age of 13, who failed to return to India or to reindenture themselves. It set up such barriers to enterprise that some
32,000 Indians, representing 25 per cent of the population, repatriated
themselves during the years of its operation.
The situation called for counter-action, but the Indians were divided
among themselves economically and ethnically, with religious and
linguistic barriers preventing the organization of a common front.
Whilst the business class made legal representations of a personal
type or organized petitions of a small group nature, the large
majority of the indentured labourers remained inarticulate and
inhibited in their social and economic depressions. Generally, the
Indians possessed little appreciation of the efficacy of the vote, and
even when entitled to it, used it to little purpose.
The dramatic awakening of Indian political conscience may be traced
to 1890, when Gandhi came to Natal. A highly educated and
principled young man, he was appalled by the degradations imposed
on British Indian subjects. On a journey from Durban to Pretoria, he
was thrown out of the coach at Pietermaritzburg for daring to travel
first class with Europeans, soundly boxed about the ears at
Charlestown for exerting his rights as a passenger, and rudely
pushed off the sidewalks in Johannesburg. He felt keenly the need for
enlightened guidance in the Indian community and accurately
diagnosed its immediate weakness as its complete inarticulateness in
the language of the government.
Founding the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, he accepted the
challenge of his environment, and with the theme of Satyagraha,
succeeded in identifying the political purpose of the Hindu with the
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Muslim, the freed with the indentured, the South Indian with the
North Indian.
His first reaction to the Indian problem in Natal was to inform the
British government and public of the atrocities committed under
their names. He was convinced of their ignorance in the matter and
believed the solution to the question to lie in British enlightenment.
Satyagraha itself, expressing active opposition to inflexible authority,
developed as a final appeal to the British conscience when all other
constitutional methods of approach had failed.
Despite the magnificence of his contribution in arousing the political
consciousness of the Indian people and giving to the world a new
approach to political struggle, his philosophy has not remained
unchallenged, even by his followers. No great figure of theory
remains without criticism, and Gandhi himself admits to having
committed Himalayan blunders, which have had the effect of placing
brakes upon the militancy of the people. There is little doubt that in
South Africa, as later in India, his preoccupation with the impact of
soul force reacted against the interest of the people’s immediate and
material benefits, and tended to validate the accusation that the
allegiance of Satyagraha ultimately and objectively served the
interests of those in power.
The practical applications of his philosophy in the South African
passive resistance campaigns of 1908 and 1913 resulted in meager
gains and frustration for the Indian people. As forces of political
education, their impact was unquestionable. But as techniques of
liberation, they were ineffective. While both campaigns unified and
strengthened the Indians in their struggle, they also halted progress
during moments of supreme strategic importance, because Gandhi
placed greater value on the achievement of spiritual victory over the
hearts of those in power than on the acquisition of material benefits
for the Satyagrahis.
In 1907 he called off the Transvaal campaign, after a 100 percent
boycott of the Indian pass-imposing Act had been achieved and a
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popular resistance movement launched, on the misguided
assumption that governmental overtures to compromise were caused
by a conversion of heart. In 1913, at a time when it appeared obvious
to all that the government had been brought to bay, he choose to
demonstrate Indian magnanimity of heart, rather than exploit the
situation for the immediate rectification of Indian rights. Never
before and never since have the Indians in South Africa held such a
position of crucial economic importance. The mammoth Indian
strike, in sympathy with the heroic march of the Newcastle mine
workers who, with women and children, had set out to cross the
Transvaal border on foot in violation of unjust anti-Indian laws, had
disastrous effects for industry in natal. The European mineworkers’
strike on the Rand coinciding with this demonstration, placed the
government in a particularly precarious position. Gandhi, however,
intent on his spiritual victory, called off the Indian campaign, thus
leaving the government unhampered to deal all the more effectively
with the European strikers.
Gandhian concepts never quite convinced the Indians in South Africa
or in India. The technique of passive resistance was invariably used
with a difference in interpretation between Gandhi and his
followers. Gandhi himself had visualized such a misunderstanding
and, in order to obviate it, had in the first instance suggested the
restriction of its use to highly trained personnel. He conceived
passive resistance as a specialized weapon which only the spiritually
pure could utilize.
His concept, logically followed, precluded mass utilization of the
technique, and his first appeal was thus made to the middle-class
trading element, who he felt would be sufficiently enlightened to
appreciate and follow it. It was the unsophisticated worker, however,
who gave passive resistance its strength and developed its potential
as a force of mass coercion. In 1913, he followed Gandhi with
unflinching faith. In 1946, he responded to the call of Satyagraha with
matching valour, and, in more recent ears, the non-European workers
have responded to the call of non-violence with admirable discipline.
478
It is undoubtedly the aspect of Passive Resistance which gives forth
hope for the effecting of social change without resource to violence
which has upheld it in the hearts of the Indian people. It is also this
aspect of the philosophy which has attracted to its orbit the cooperation of large groups of people professing allegiance to different
ideological creeds.
Satyagraha as a weapon of multi-racial usage, however, did not occur
until almost half a century after its origin on South African soil. For
many years after the departure of Mahatma Ghandi from the
country, the creed of Satyagraha lost its continuity in the life of
formal Indian political expression. The period following his
departure, however, a period offset by two World Wars and the
tremendous impact of industrialization, laid the basis for a vitally
changed South African society, in which circumstantial forces paved
the way for a future state of non-European cooperation.
Economic factors, especially in Natal, acted as great levelers of
African and Indian interests. The “civilized labour policy” had
retrieved and isolated the European worker from the morass of
labour competition and assed economic legislation which affected all
non-European workers equally.
Indians, though organized into a strong trade union movement,
realized the futility of their labour strength in the absence of an
equally strong African labour movement. Tragically they watched
their strike actions increase their own unemployment as
unsophisticated African workers replaced their labour.
The Gandhian movement had based itself on the theory of Indian
exclusiveness, and had believed in the political distinctiveness of the
Indian problem. To the average Indian who groped in the maze of
industrial competition and who became quickly identified with the
social and economic depletions of the non-European people, this was
a myth which exploded all too dramatically.
479
Unfortunately, formal Indian political organization did not reflect the
vitally changed situation in which Indians were finding themselves.
The post-Gandhian era saw a leadership which remained pathetically
aloof from the problems of its following. Inheriting neither the
philosophy of Satyagraha nor formulating any political principles of
its own, it preferred a state of precarious suspension between the two
major race groups, in the false belief that acceleration of their
acceptance within the ranks of the dominant class depended on
Indian isolation from the general problems of racial discrimination in
South Africa.
Indian political leadership approved the diplomatic interference of
the British Indian government and the conclusion of the Cape Town
Agreement in 1927—an Agreement which accepted the principle of
repatriation for South African Indians at a time when every Indian
had become a Union national. Instead of a principled and logical
opposition to all facets of racial discrimination, it endured in 1944 the
conclusion of the Pretoria Agreement, which accepted the policy of
segregation fro the Indian people in return for certain economic
concessions of a temporary nature safeguarding the vested interest of
a small section of the community.
It was inevitable that a leadership at such variance with its following
would soon lose its authority. In 1946, it was finally ousted by those
who joined together working class interests with the intellectual
guidance of Gandhian principles and Socialism. It had watched in
awesome anticipation the forces of Satyagraha under the emotional
impact of Mahatma Gandhi and the practical guidance of Nehru
cleave the path to Indian liberation.
In 1946, this new leadership restaged Passive Resistance in South
Africa and led some 2,000 enthusiasts to prison in opposition to an
Act which sought their isolation from the rest of South African
society. Their campaign, though in obvious form similar to the
original Gandhian campaign, was appreciably different in its
ultimate direction and political aspirations. It was launched in a
mood which understood both the expediency and ethics of joint
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political action, a mood which sought non-European rather than
Indian liberation.
For South Africa, this revised interpretation of the Passive Resistance
weapon held crucial significance. It accelerated the growth of united
militancy among the non-White peoples and heralded anew era in
the development of a non-racial united democratic front in the
country. There is little doubt that, despite its ‘Indian’ character, the
campaign stressed and eloquently exhibited faith in a united
struggle, ultimately directed towards the achievement of ends which
would benefit equally all South Africans, not Indians alone.
Fundamental to non-European political maturity in South African
has been the alliance of the African and Indian Congresses. Whilst
1946 saw the organization of an Indian political front which had rid
itself of group restrictive sentiments, it was not until 1950 that a
similar change expressed itself on the African frontier; a year after the
tragic racial disturbances in Durban between the Indian and African
peoples. The riots came as a serious warning to the Leadership, who
realized that if the economic identification of the two peoples did not
receive progressive political guidance, the situation could be horribly
misused b the government to create racial strife within the ranks of
the non-White race. It expedited united action on the part of the two
Congresses who, despite the Dadoo-Xuma Pact of 1946, had
remained aloof from each other. In 1950, Africans and Indians jointly
and equally participated in the National Day of Protest against racial
discrimination, and in 1952, the two Congresses together launched
the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign, patterned on the lines of the
1946 Passive Resistance movement. The success of their unity served
as a forerunner to the formation of the Coloured and European
Congresses and to the setting up of an effective united barrier against
anti-democratic forces.
Though many factors have combined to effect this democratic unit in
South Africa, central to its theme of action has been its adherence to
the form of Satyagraha. There is little doubt that, but for the
profound humanitarianism and the generous tolerance of all creeds
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intrinsic in its philosophy, t could not have drawn together such
diverse elements of political struggle. It also seems fairly clear that
without its direction in the non-European movement itself, the nonWhite struggle for self-expression would not have drawn to itself the
magnificent world support which it has done.
The racial situation in South Africa beckons a major upheaval. The
Indians are aware of this and see the solution in the alliance of their
political sympathy with those who wish to broaden the frontiers of
democracy and who readily accept that the lead in this respect lies in
united thought and action.
Satyagraha, non-violence, passive resistance, civil disobedience—one
may choose any of these terms and accept either the Gandhian
philosophy or the tactics of the struggle. The fact is that the Indian
people are marching forward as a vital section of the democratic force
of South Africa, and their philosophy of Satyagraha continues to play
an invaluable role in their progress to freedom.
Chapter 37
The African Journalist
482
by
Tom Hopkinson
Ten years ago I was editing the leading British picture magazine, the
Picture Post. It was a paper with a high and steady sale, big profits,
produced by a team of writers and cameramen chosen out of the
entire field of British journalism.
Today, I am the editor of Drum, a South African magazine for “nonwhites” or “non-Europeans,” a struggling mafazine with a circulation
reckoned in tens of thousands. Our tiny staff---with its abilities and
shortcomings, its courage and energy, its unexplained absences and
occasional despairs---is virtually irreplaceable; only a handful of
Africans have any journalistic training.
Drum is a monthly picture magazine, dependent for its interest
mainly on photographs. It is published in four editions: the original
South African, almost eight years old, with a circulation of 80-90,000;
two editions for West Africa, one of 90,000 for Nigeria and one of
about 60,000 for Ghana. There is also a small but growing East
African edition. All are entirely in English; all are printed in
Johannesburg from material compiled in their own territories, and,
after printing, face journeys up to six weeka before they are put on
sale.
Because most of the readers are bitterly poor, each copy is read to
pieces by as many as twenty people; so that each month’s edition has
a readership approaching 5,000,000 Africans, Indians and Coloureds.
But, unlike Britain or America, where a single article might priduce
400 letters, our is a silent audience. They read; perhaps they absorb;
but they rarely answer back.
Secondly, our readers are intensely local in their interests. For our
South African edition alone, we must think of satisfying our
sophisticated, politically conscious African readers in the big cities as
well as the uneducated mine workers; we have to please the cultured
483
and self-conscious Indians of Natal (there are more than 150,000 of
them in Durban alone); in the Cape we must draw at least 15,000
readers from the Coloureds, a racially mixed community a million
and a quarter strong, whose origins belong to a time when rigid
separation of the races was not yet believed to have been ordained by
God.
Each of these sections---and subsections within these sections--requires special consideration, and is quickly resentful if its
achievements are not recognized or its difficulties recorded. Each
tends to resent the space allotted to the other. When I asked a leading
Coloured citizen in Capetown what we could do to make our paper
more interesting, his reply was: “If you wish, Mr. Hopkinson, to
secure Coloureds as readers of your paper, you must remove from it
what I call ‘the African taint.’”
So much for our readers! Now what about the staff? It is hard for
anyone outside to form a picture of social conditions in South Africa.
I find among people I met, Afrikaners and English, great interest--quite often a friendly interest---as to what editing a magazine for
“non-Europeans” involves. The interest is mixed with astonishment
and an almost total ignorance of how three quarters of the human
beings in this country live and think and feel. Perhaps two questions
from different people, both asked in good faith and not
unsympathetically, give some suggestions of the atmosphere.
“Do you mean that you work in the same room with them?”
“Then you actually talk over with natives what you’re going to do?”
An African journalist or cameraman in South Africa faces enormous
handicaps. He has difficulties in getting about. Parts of the country
where trouble breaks out are from time to time banned to journalists--and remained banned. There are parts even of the city of
Johannesburg, our headquarters, which are hard for him to reach
promptly because there is so little public transport which a black man
484
may use. A piece of mosdt mornings has to be spent organizing how
our one small car can be made to cover the most ground.
Though some government officials are friendly and helpful, this
applies as a rule pnly at a high level. Petty officials will keep the
black reporter waiting on principle, send him round to the back door,
refuse information they supply at once when a white reporter asks
for it.
He is involved in clashes with the police who resent the idea of a
black man as a journalist, and particularly as a photographer. Our
cameramen have been “taken inside” on the grounds that they are
“obstructing the pavements,” “impeding the police,” or on suspicion
of having stolen their own cameras. It is fair to add that if one can get
access to an officer, the matter will usually be put right; it is not, as a
rule, the officers but the teen-age youths they command, and an
occasional bullying sergeant, who resent “the natives’ cheekiness” in
aspiring to be journalists. (I have had, in the interest of my staff, more
contact with the police in the twelve months I have been with Drum
than in the whole of my previous life---starting with my first
Saturday in Johannesburg, when I had to try to recover our office boy
who had been arrested for leaving his all important “pass” at home.)
The giving or refusal of police passes is another means of
discrimination. In South Africa the police chiefs decide who is a
recognized journalist. Any journalist or cameraman who cannot
show an officially signed police pass can be---and often is---treated as
an impostor. But it is the police themselves who sign or do not sign
the passes, so it is thjey who have created the imposture.
Nor is the decision based on a person’s criminal record, or on some
knowledge of his political or social views. I myself was refused a
police pass almost as soon as I arrived in South Africa.
This is perhaps the place to mention that---contrary, I think, to most
outside opinion---there is no direct interference with press freedom in
South Africa. I have never received official criticism of anything
485
published in Drum, nor have I ever experienced official pressure
either to publish or to refrain from publishing any article.
A further difficulty for the African journalist is that he has so limited
an opportunity to acquire training in his profession. Few papers or
magazines are either owned or run by Africans. No South African
“white” newspaper---and this is to me one of the most astonishing
features of South African journalism---employs an African columnist
or reporter. Although in the struggle for circulation an increasing
amount of space is given to “the natives,” the reporters’ positions are
all filled by white men.
Not only is there no training available for the African journalist on
white newspapers but also he has very little prospect of obtaining it
on publications of his own---which as yet scarcely exist. This poses a
considerable problem in maintaining discipline: “You won’t be able
to fire anyone,” I was warned when I started work, “because nobody
can possibly be replaced.” It is surprising, under these conditions, to
find talent, enterprise and a readiness to learn. Another thing I
constantly find, and this forms one of the principal enjoyments of my
work, is a delightful freshness and directness in the writing, which
means, of course, a directness and freshness in the point of view.
The African reporter goes straight at or into his story. He sees
everything new, as a fresh personal experience, and he writes as he
thinks, not in a made-up journalistic language. Take this sccount of a
children’s party:
It starts an hour late and there are so many kids around I
can’t even count them. Only they are on the outside
goggling in. Inside the house there are only adults making
merry and long-winded speeches. The only kid around is
Teaspoon in whose honor the party is being held.
Teaspoon is crying his little head off, and I don’t blame
him.
Or this, at a police station:
A few more guys, including the old geezer who’s wearing
an outfit that looks like a hand-me-down from Noah, were
486
also then charged.
The word “guys” is the key to a point of special interest---the
difference in outlook between the African of South Africa and the
West African. The African of South Africa wants to be white: he is
strongly attracted to the language, manners, interests of the white
man. Drum is full of advertisements for products which claim to
hwlp the black man, oe woman, look more like the white---hair
straighteners, powdersand creams to lighten the skin, English and
American clothes and hats.
The black man in South Africa is not as yet actively hostile to the
white: he is in the position of the constantly rejected wooer still
hoping against hope, the could-be friend who continues to hold out
his hand. And the center and focus of his admiration is the United
States. The African likes American films and records; he is proud of
the influence of American and African music and dancing on each
other. His big shots---who, in the conditions of this country, are
mainly gangsters---drive American cars and copy American
mannerisms and slang. So, too, the African journalist takes American
writers as his model.
Here is an extract from a record reviewby a well-known writer and
composer, Todd Matshikiza:
Brothers. . . I’ve got smashing news for you. Real hot-poker
stuff. The kind of dope that you get once in a blue moon.
D’you know King Force? Hey? The big, broad-shouldered,
hawk-eyed veteran sax maniac. Hey? The chap that’s the
life blood of the great Jazz Maniacs Orchestra of Johburg.
You should know who I’m talking about, man. The fellow
that lots of recording firms have begged and begged with
big bags and bundles of dough to make discs for them.
And he always said, “Nix.” The great guy that gulps giggle
water by the gallon and makes greater and greater sounds
with every additional drop. What a man. Everybody that’s
ever heard this sax giant has been raving mad about him. If
487
you’ve never had the upper-tune-ity, well it’s here, because
King Force, alias Wilson Silgee, has gone and made a disc
at last. Yes, man, King Force is now uptainable on record.
He’s gone and taken a few fine birds from the Jazz Maniacs
Ork, put them plumb in the middle of Gallos studio and
cut Sibatatu and King Force Drag on Gallotone G. B. 1953.
He calls his combo “King Force and his Jazz Forces.” For a
label nothing could be more suitabler. King Force once
chased a man around a whole block of houses with an axe.
The man had broken one of King Force’s discs. He has over
one thousand. The famous chase just shows you his
character. Powerful, forceful, hot, dripping with go. His
music is just like that. Man, I can’t describe music when it’s
great. Can you describe what you heard when it made you
mad when you heard it? If you can then I’m loony . . .
In West Africa this admiration for America is entirely absent. The
West African doesn’t imitate anybody; he is content, often bubblingly
delighted, to be himself. West African publications do not print
advertisements for hair straighteners or skin-whitening creams. The
West African prefers his gleaming blackness and is happy to wear his
traditional togalike, brightly colored dress. He is becoming
increasingly master of his own destiny, and he expects to play a big
part in this destiny of his continent, and indeed of the whole world.
“You wait!” I have been warned by a Nigerian acquaintance. “It will
not be long before we Nigerians come down on you in South Africa
and sort matters out with our own hands.”
If West Africans have a model, it is Britain rather than America---but
Britain of the 18th, not the 20th, Century. I have noticed that the
characters they admire are the dominating and swashbuckling, the
man who can force his way to the top in politics or money-making, or
else fall with a resounding crash. They like ruthlessness, ebullience,
extravagance, which is why attempts made to discredit their leaders
nearly always operate to make them even more popular.
488
“What!” I once heard a listener say, whose hero was accused of
dipping into the public till. “You mean he’s been getting away with
fifty thousand pounds a tear? What a man! Why can’t we have him as
prime minister?”
In journalism also, the 18th Century, with its vigor and freedom of
speech, is the accepted model. There is a good daily and weekly press
in Nigeria, as there is also in Ghana. In Nigeria the Daily Times, Daily
Service, West African Pilot, and Nigerian Tribune are all ably written
and edited, have a developing sense of responsibility and are
continually interesting to a reader like myself. Their specialty is
political attack, with a refreshing freedom of vituperation and no
pressing fear of the law of libel. Here is a typical extract from an
editorial:
The forthcoming general election is going to be a battle of life
and death. We admit that ‘life and death’ is quite a strong
phrase to use. But we are just being very plain and realistic. It
is now clear beyond cavil that it is a battle between a single
political party and a combined force of autocracy, bad faith and
brutality. The naked truth is that the Action Group must win
the election. Any other choice means that the Federation of
Nigeria is doomed. It might as well go to the dogs.
The party is the only saviour Nigeria possesses at the moment.
If an organization is so full of lazy yawning drones that it is
always at pains to peoduce election manifestoes or
memoranda on matters of the moment, if a party is so
hopelessly draft that it has to wait for the leader of the Action
Group to speak only to follow up with childish comments, then
it is time all lovers of progress should decide to keep it at arm’s
length. The conspiratorial gang that now challenges Nigeria
must be broken by all means.
Besides political vituperation, the distinguishing marks of West
African journalism are a voluptuous enthusiasm in the writing, a
rolling rotundity of phrase and a shy deprecating humor. Here is an
example of each mood; both pieces are the work of the same man--489
Nelson Ottah, editor of Drum’s Nigerian edition. The first refers to
the sensational life and violent death of a Nigerian politician:
Then, on March 25, this year, came another sensational story
about the man whose whole life has been like a meteoric flame.
THE STORY WAS THAT ALHADJI ADEGOKE ADELABU
WAS DEAD!
How did he die? Some said he had been shot. Some said he
was killed with juju. Many others said he was run over by his
political enemies. A few said he had died in a suicide drive.
Only the well-informed knew then that he had died in a car
accident. But the fantastic story of his death had gone round
Ibadan. Alhadji Adelabu dead? Impossible! But if he is dead,
others will die with him! Down with his killers! Down with all
those who have hands in his death! Kill and burn them! Spare
no one! Let no one live after Ade! Over his grave let us march!
There was the shout of the Ibadan masses. And it was no idle
cry. . . .
After a volcanic life and a volcanic death, with the souls of
twenty men to keep him company. Alhadji Adegoke
Adelabu—the colossal egotist, the god and prophet of
Ibadan—must still now, if there is afterlife, be stepping it off
to brass band and bugle to keep his rendezvous with the noble
and gallant band, composed of all the manic personages who
had with lines of fire stamped their names on the face of our
all-too-sane world.
And for the puncturing humor, this account of an elephant hunt:
Let’s go a big-game hunting with Mr. Y. O. Yarro, the best
known of Nigeria’s elephant killers. Well, here we are, Mr.
Yarro, the best known of Nigeria’s elephant killers. Well, here
we are, Mr. Yarro! And what is this place called, eh? Oh,
Annam, you say. Very well. Where are the elephants.
490
Mr. Yarro led us into the jungle. Then, suddenly, he stopped,
and said to me, “Be quiet. Do you hear something? Here they
come. Now, don’t make any move. Hold your breath a bit.
Elephants have a very keen sense of smell. Take a look at that
pair, a husband and a wife. I’m going to get the husband. Wait
here!”
And, of course, I waited. Mr. Yarro started forward, almost
crawling on his belly, dragging his rifle with him. After a very
little time he disappeared from view.
Then I became nervous. The jungle was having some effect on
me. I was shaking all over. What has happened to Mr. Yarro?
Why hasn’t he shot the damn thing? Supposing a leopard
should decide to pay me a visit! How am I to deal with the
noble beast? Show a pair of legs or shake hands and become
matey?
I could no longer stand it. I coughed nervously. After a while
Mr. Yarro appeared almost from nowhere. His appearance
nearly gave me heart failure. He eyed me steadily for some
time, and then muttered, “The elephants have made off. Your
coughing scared them.”
One final feature of West African journalism is an occasional
inconsequence, a liberated absurdity of phrase or gesture. West
Africans do not enjoy references to this characteristic by others than
themselves. However, it is oone of the things which make life in their
countries so agreeable---and one I always look forward to. It is
summed up b y this notice on a chemist’s shop in Accra:
ENSIGN FILMS
LEICA FILMS
ANSCO FILMS
KODAK FILMS
491
BOW TIES
Here is a prose sample from another part of Africa:
It must be brought to the notice of the public and the world at
large that Nyasas have proved beyond any margin of doubt
that Mr. Chirwa’s politics is all hypocrisy; which employs
merely as a means to an end, that end being self-enrichment.
Mr. Chirwa had full opportunity to try his chance as a national
leader since he arrived in the country from South Africa until
Nyasas passed a resolution that no further representation in the
Federal Assembly was necessary. Hence Mr. Chirwa has lost
both his chance and popularity and is no longer recognized in
the political field of Malawi people. He must clearly understand
that people can do, will do, and are doing smoothly better
without him.
To Dr. Banda, we rejoice in saying that that is one of the signs of
your unparalleled victory. Proceed! Dr. Banda, you have our
fullest mandate, and are all in the innermost pocket of your
political overcoat. To Mr. Chirwa, we warn you that we shall
keep you howling on because your political socks are worn out
beyond repair, so that your attempt to pull them up just
exp;oses your burnt heels!
This extract from a manifesto put out by the Nyasaland African
Congress Youth League---in support of its hero, Dr. Hastings Banda,
and against his rival, Mr. Wellington Chirwa---gives a glimpse both
od politics and of African journalistic style in the Federation of
Northern Rhodesia [today Zambia], Southern Rhodesia [Zimbabwe]
and Nyasaland [today Malawi].
Journalistically, both the Federation and the East African territories
(Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika [today Tanzania]) show a rather
similar picture. There are a number of competently run papers for the
white man, most of them accepting the necessity for political and
492
social change but wishing it would not come quite so fast. On the
other side are African journals, mostly in Swahili, ill-printed and
restricted to local news, yet with boundless enthusiasm and
confidence in their own future, and with much the same uninhibited
vigor of language found in West Africa.
Among such papers are Tazama, Jicho (“the eye”), and Uhuru
(“Freedom”), a mimeographed broadsheet put out by the People’s
Convention Party in support of its political hero, Tom Mboya. All
these are published in Nairobi. The Nyanza Times is published in
Kisumu, Kenya, and Mwafrika, alively weekly newspaper written in
Swahili with a circulation of about 20,000, has its center in Dar-esSalaam, Tanganyika.
Recently the two editors of Mwafrika, Robert Makange and K. R.
Baghdelleh, had to serve a six-month prison sentence for publishing
an article “likely to raise discontent or promote ill-will between the
communities.” The article contained a sentence which read,
translated literally, “the British are not here for the benefit of our
country but for sucking our blood.” Though it was argued in court
that literal blood-sucking was not implied---merely economic
exploitation---the prison sentence was passed and served. Racial
antagonism in Tanganyika, however, is happily slight, and at the
party following the editor’s release, two leading white newspaper
executives were honored guests.
Finally, a word about magazines. In South Africa there are, besides
Drum, two monthly magazines for “non-white” readers, Zonk and
Bona! Zonk, which takes its name from a onetime popular company of
entertainers, is a lighthearted medley of stories, photographs, jokes
and drawings.
Bona! Is a magazine produced with governmeny sympathy and a
substantial indirect subsidy in the form of some 35,000 or more copies
bought at full retail prices for compulsory distribution through
government-run schools. It has three language editions---Zulu, Xhosa
and Sesotho. It is largely photographic, old-fashioned in layout, but
493
skillfully edited to cover a wide field of African interests---apart, of
course from the two main interests of politics and racial problems,
upon which it never touches.
In the Federation an interesting venture has recently been making
progress. This is a monthly, Parade, mainly in English but partly in
vernacular, which boasts it is “the only magazine in Southern Africa
edited and printed by Africans for Africans.” It is believed to have a
circulation of from 20-30,000. In content it resembles an old-fashioned
“home magazine,” with all the conventional features, social and
party gossip, dress patterns, cooking instructions, jokes and riddles,
as well as a children’s club run by “Uncle Zoom Zoom.” A special
feature is made, as with all magazines for Africans, of advice to the
lovelorn:
Dear Jenny, My heart is very sorrowful. I do not know what to
do with the problem that faces me. I am fifteen years of age and
I have put a girl of fourteen into pregnancy. I am a schoolboy
and she is not. I cannot imagine leaving school at this stage for
marriage. I am too young for that and the girl is unlearned.
My principal does not know about it. The day he does I shall be
finished as far as learning is concerned. My parents advised me
to agree to the girl’s parents that I was responsible for her
present situation and that I would marry her after my schooling
and I did this, but I do not love the girl. Shall I just go on
pretending that I am going to marry the girl when I am not
going to? I ask you, Jenny, should I reject her now or after my
schooling?
N. V. M. M.
Belingwe.
(Be faithful to the girl you have put into trouble. After finishing
your schooling you will be old enough to make a happy home
of your own with her.You would not like to be let down by
anybody yourself, so why want to let anyone down especially
the girl whose future is now at your mercy? She is your wife
and after school you should settle down and make a home with
494
her.---JENNY.)
In Nairobi a fortnightly picture magazine called Picha---“picture”
transposed into the vernacular---has just been started, but it is too
soon to know how it will shape, or whether indeed it will survive.
The French produce, from Dakar and Paris, an intelligent monthly
picture magazine with the engaging title Bingo, whose aim seems to
be to cement the ties between France and her newly established
“Franco-African Community.”
Apart from these, there is little in the field of magazines south of the
Sahara.
What is the future for African newspapers and magazines? The
answer is in one word---boundless. The African all over the continent
craves education. Hundreds of thousands---probably millions---of
new readers are being turned out every year. Except in one or two
patches---such as South Africa---there is a desperate dearth of
reading matter. Papers can establish themselves now, play a real part
in Africa’s mental opening up, and have decades---indeed centuries--of profitable life before them.
To the work of journalism the African brings a sharp eye, a nose for
news, and an extremely uninhibited pen. His greatest need is a sense
of responsibility and the understanding that tolerance and
moderation are not weaknesses; they are the slow distillation of
confidence and strength.
Responsibility only comes by exercising it, and for this, over most of
Africa, he has had small chance indeed. But an entirely new era is
now beginning in which the African will increasingly and rapidly
take charge of his own journalistic, as of all his other, affairs.
In the meantime it is, for the white man in black journalism, a lively
and rewarding life.
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Chapter 37
Freedom For Africans Means Freedom For All
by
Robert Sobukwe
The Pan-Africanist Congress came into being at Orlando during the
Good Friday week-end. It issued quite a number of statements which
shed light on Pan-Africanist policy. We propose to publish some of
these because of their importance to all the peoples of South Africa.
We start with the opening speech given by Mr. Robert M. Sobukwe,
496
who was elected President of the Pan-Africanists:--Mr. Chairman,
Sons and daughters of Africa.
The Chairman has already informed you that we had hoped that this
inaugural convention of the Africanists would be opened by Dr.
Kamuza Hastings Banda, failing which, by Mr. K. Kaunda of the
Zambia ANC in Northern Rhodesia. Both have been unable to attend
our convention for both are now, in the language of the colonialists,
“detained” in some concentration camps, because they dared to
demand the right of self-determination for the indigenous African
people of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. The honourable task of
opening this conference has, therefore, fallen on me, an Africanist,
and I wish to thank the Central Committee for the honour. I am
particularly grateful for the opportunity this offers me to treat briefly
of certain issues relevant to our struggle which though adequately
treated in the documents that will be considered b this convention
require to be presented to such a gathering.
I hope then, Mr. Speaker, in the course of my address, to answer
broadly questions pertaining to our stand in contemporary
international politics, our relation to the states of Africa, independent
and dependent, our attitude to the Nationalist movements in Africa,
our stand on the question of race in general and the so-called racial
question in South Africa. Finally, I hope to outline briefly our
ultimate objectives.
We are living today, Sons and Daughters of the Soil, fighters in the
cause of African freedom; we are living today in an era that is
pregnant with untold possibilities, for both good and evil. In the
course of the past two years we have seen man breaking asunder
with dramatic suddenness the chains that have bound his mind,
solving problems which for ages it has been regarded as sacrilege
even to attempt to solve. The tremendous, epoch-making scientific
achievements in the exploration of space, with man-made satellites
orbiting the earth, the new and interesting discoveries made in the
Geophysical year, the production of rust resistant strains of wheat in
the field of agriculture, the amazing discoveries in the field of
497
medicine, chemistry and physics, all three, mean that man is
acquiring a better knowledge of his environment and is well on the
way to establishing absolute control over the environment.
However, in spite of these rapid advances in the material and
physical world, man appears to be unwilling or unable to solve the
problems of social relations between man and man. Because of this
failure on the part of man, we see the world split today into two large
hostile blocs, the so-called Capitalist and Socialist blocs, represented
by America and Russia respectively. These two blocs are engaged in
terrible competition, use tough language and tactics, employ
brinkmanship stunts which have the whole world heading for a
nervous breakdown. They each are armed with terrible weapons of
destruction and continue to spend millions of pounds in the
production of more and more of these weapons. In spite of all the
diplomatic talks of co-existence, these blocs each behave as though
they do not believe that co-existence is possible.
The question then arises, where does Africa fit into this picture and
where, particularly, do we African nationalities, we Africanists in
South Africa, fit in. There is no doubt that with the liquidation of
Western Imperialism and Colonialism in Asia, the Capitalist market
has shrunk considerably. As a result, Africa has become the happy
hunting ground of adverturistic capital. There is again a scramble for
Africa and both the Soviet Union and the United States are trying to
win the loyalty of the African States,. Africa is being wooed with
more ardour than she has ever been. There is a lot of flirting going
on, of course, some Africans flirting with the Soviet camp and others
with the American camp. In some cases the courtship has reached a
stage where the parties are going out together; and they probably
hold hands in the dark, but nowhere has it yet reached a stage where
the parties can kiss in public without blushing.
This wooing occurs at a time when the whole continent of Africa is in
labour, suffering the pangs of a new birth, and everybody is looking
anxiously and expectantly towards Africa to see as our people so
aptly put it ukulhi iyozala nkomoni (what creature will come forth). We
498
are being wooed internationally at a time when in South Africa the
naked forces of savage Herrenvolhism are running riot; when a
determined effort is being made to annihilate the African people
through systematic starvation; at a time when brutal attempts are
being made to retard, dwarf and stunt the mental development of a
whole people through organized “mis-education”; at a time when
thousands of our people roam the streets in search of work and are
being told by the foreign ruler to go back to a “home” which he has
assigned them whether that means the break-up of his families or
not; at a time when the distinctive badge of slavery and humiliation,
the “dom-pas” is being extended from the African male dog to the
African female bitch. It is at this time, when fascist tyranny has
reached its zenith in South Africa, that Africa’s loyalty is competed
for. And the question is what is our answer.
Our answer, Mr. Speaker and Children of the Soil, has been given by
the African leaders of the Continent. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has
repeatedly stated that in international affairs, Africa wishes to pursue
a policy of positive neutrality, allying herself to neither of the existing
blocs but, in the words of Dr. Nuamdi Azikiwa of Nigeria, remaining
“neutral in nothing and independent in everything that concerns the
destiny of Africa.” Mr. Tom Mboya of Kenya has expressed himself
more forthrightly, declaring that it is not the intention of African
sisters to change one master (Western Imperialism for one other
master (Soviet tutelage).
We endorse the views of the African leaders on this point. But we
must point out that we are not blind to the fact that the countries
which pursue a policy of planned State Economy have outstripped,
in industrial development, those that follow the path of private
enterprise. Today, China is industrially far ahead of India.
Unfortunately, this rapid industrial development has been
accompanied in all cases by a rigid totalitarianism notwithstanding
Mao Tse Tsung’s “Hundred Flowers” announcements. And
Africanists reject totalitarianism in any form and express political
democracy as understood in the West. We also reject the economic
exploitation of the many for the benefit of a few. We accept as policy
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the equitable distribution of wealth aiming, as far as I am concerned,
to equality of income which to me is the only basis on which the
slogan of “equal opportunities” can be founded.
Borrowing then, the best from the East and the best from the West,
we nonetheless retain and maintain our distinctive personality and
refuse to be the satraps or stooges of any other power.
Our relation to the States in Africa can be stated most briefly and
precisely by quoting from George Padmore’s book, Pan-Africanism or
Communism. Discussing the future of Africa, Padmore observes that,
“there is a growing feeling among politically conscious Africans
throughout the continent that their destiny is one, that what happens
to one part of Africa to Africans must affect Africans “living in other
parts.”
We honour Gbana as the first independent State in modern Africa
which under the courageous nationalist leadership of Dr. Nkrumah
and the C.P.P. which positively interested itself in liberation of the
whole continent from White domination and has held out the vision
of a democratic United States of Africa. We regard it as the sacred
duty of each and every African state to strive ceaselessly and
energetically for the creation of a United States of Africa stretching
from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar.
The days of small, independent countries are gone. Today the most
powerful countries in the world, America and Russia, cover huge
tracts of land territorially and number hundreds of millions in
population. On the other hand the small, weak independent countries
of Europe are beginning to realize that for their own survival they
have to form military and economic federations—hence NATO and
the European Market.
Besides the sense of a common historical fate that we share with
other countries of Africa, it is imperative for purely practical reasons,
that the whole of Africa be united into a single unit, centrally
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controlled. Only in that way can we solve the immense problems that
face the continent.
It is for the reasons stated above that we admire, bless and ally
ourselves with all the Nationalist movements in Africa. They are at
the core, the basic unit, the individual cells of the large organism it is
our duty to nourish—the United States of Africa. A Union of free,
sovereign independent democratic sisters.
For the lasting peace of Africa and the economic, social and political
problems of the continent, there needs must be a return to democratic
principles. This means White supremacy, under whatever guise it
manifests itself, must be destroyed. And that is what the Nationalist
movements on the continent are settling out to do. They are all
agreed that the African majority must rule. In the African context, it
is the overwhelming African majority that will mould and shape the
content of democracy. Allow me to quote Dr. Du Bois, the father of
Pan-Africanism, “Most men in the world,” writes Dr. Du Bois, “are
coloured. A belief in humanity means a belief in coloured men. The
future of the world will, to all reasonable possibility, be what
coloured men make it.”
As for the world, so for Africa. The future of Africa will be what
Africans make it.
And now for the thorny question of race! I do not wish to give a
lengthy and learned dissertation on race! Suffice it to say that event
hose scientists who do recognize the existence of separate races, have
to admit that there are borderline cases which will not fit into any of
the three races of mankind.
All scientists agree that all men can trace their ancestry to the first
Homo Sapiens, that man is distinguished from other mammals and
also from earlier types of man by the nature of his intelligence. The
structure of the body of man provides evidence to prove the
biological unity of the human species. All scientists agree that there is
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no “race” that is superior to another and there is no race that is
inferior to others.
The Africanists take the view that there is only one race to which we
belong and that is the human race. In our vocabulary, therefore, the
word race, as applied to man, has no plural form. We do, however,
admit the existence of observable physical differences between
various groups of people. But these differences are the result of a
number of factors, chief among which has been geographical
isolation.
In Africa, the myth of race has been propounded by the imperialists
and colonists from Europe in order to facilitate and justify their
inhuman exploitation of the indigenous people of the land. It is from
this myth of race with its attendant claims of cultural superiority that
the doctrine of White Supremacy stems. Thus it is that an ex-engine
driver can think of himself s fully qualified to be the head of an
African state, but refuse too believe that a highly educated Black
doctor, more familiar with Western culture than the White Premier is,
can run even a municipal council. I do not wish to belabour this
point. Time is precious. Let me close discussion of this topic by
declaiming, on behalf of the Africanists, “that with UNESCO we hold
that every man is his brother’s keeper. For every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main because he is involved in mankind.”
In South Africa, we recognize the existence of national groups, which
are the result of geographical origin within a certain area as well as a
shared historical experience. Of these groups, the Europeans are a
foreign minority group which has exclusive control of political,
economic, social and military power. It is the dominant group. It is
the exploiting group, responsible for the pernicious doctrine of White
supremacy which has resulted in the humiliation and degradation of
the indigenous African people. It is this group which has
dispossessed the African people of their land and with arrogant
conceit has set itself up as the “guardians”, “the trustees” of the
Africans. It is this group which conceives of the African people as a
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child nation, composed of boys and girls ranging in age from 12 years
to one day.
It is this group which after 300 years can still state with brazen
effrontery that the Native, the Bantu, the Kaffir is still backward and
savage, etc. But they still want to remain “guardians”, “trustees” and
what have you of the African people. In short, it is this group which
has mismanaged affairs in South Africa just as their kith and kin are
mismanaging affairs in Europe. It is from this group that the most
rabid race-baiters and agitators come. It is the members of this group
who, whenever they meet in their Parliament, say things which
agitate the heart of millions of peace-loving Africans. This is the
group which turns out thousands of experts on the new South
African science—the Native mind.
Then there is the Indian foreign minority group. This group came to
this country not as imperialists or colonists but as indentured
labourers. In the South African set-up of today, this group is an
oppressed minority. But there are some members of this group, the
merchant class in particular, who have become tainted with the virus
of cultural supremacy and national arrogance. This class identifies
itself by and large with the oppressors, but, significantly, this is the
group which provides the political leadership of the Indian people in
South Africa. And all that the politics of this class have meant up to
now is preservation and defence of the sectional interests of the
Indian merchant class. The down-trodden,, poor “stinking coolies” of
Natal who alone can identify themselves as a result of the pressure of
natural conditions with the indigenous African majority in the
struggle to overthrow White supremacy, have not yet produced their
leadership. We hope they will do so soon.
The Africans constitute the indigenous group and form the majority
of the population. They are the most ruthlessly exploited and
subjected to humiliation, degradation and insult.
Now it is our contention that true democracy can be established in
South Africa as on the continent as a whole, only when White
503
supremacy has been destroyed. And the illiterate and semi-illiterate
African names constitute the key and centre and content of any
struggle for true democracy in South Africa. And the African people
can be organized only under the banner of African Nationalism in an
all-African organization where they will by themselves formulate
policies and programmes and decide on the methods of struggle
without interferences from either so-called left-wing or right-wing
groups of the minorities which arrogantly appropriate to themselves
the right to plan and think for the Africans.
We wish to emphasize that the freedom of the African means the
freedom of all in South Africa, the European included, because only
the African can guarantee the establishment of a genuine democracy
in which all men will be citizens of a common state and will live and
be governed as individuals and not as distinctive sectional groups.
In conclusion, I wish to state that the Africanists do not all subscribe
to the fashionable doctrine of South African Exceptionalism. Our
contention is that South Africa is an integral part of the indivisible
whole that is Africa. She cannot solve her problems in isolation from
and without utter disregard of the rest of the continent.
It is precisely for that reason that we reject both apartheid and socalled multi-racialism as solutions of our socio-economic problems.
Apart from the number of arguments that can be advanced against
apartheid, we take our stand on the principle that Africa is one and
desires to be one and nobody, I repeat nobody, has a right to Balkanise
our land.
Against “multi-racialism” we have this objection that the history of
South Africa has fostered group prejudices and antagonisms and if
we have to maintain the same group-exclusiveness, parading under
the term of multi-racialism, we shall be transporting to the new
Africa those very antagonisms and conflicts. Further, multi-racialism
is in fact a pandering to European bigotry and arrogance. It is a
method of safeguarding White interests implying as it does
proportional representation irrespective of population figures. In that
504
sense it is a complete negation of democracy. If this is not what is
meant by multi-racialism the term then implies that there are such
basic insuperable differences between the various national groups
here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive, in a
kind of democratic apartheid. That, to us is racialism multiplied,
which probably is what the term truly connotes.
We aim, politically, at the government of the Africans, by the
Africans for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty
to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an
African majority being regarded as an African. We guarantee no
minority rights because we think in terms of individuals not groups.
Economically we aim at the rapid extension of industrial
development in order to alleviate pressure on the land which is what
progress means in terms of modern society. We stand committed to a
policy of guaranteeing the most equitable distribution of wealth.
Socially we aim at the full development of the human personality and
ruthless uprooting and outlawing of all forms or manifestations of
the racial myth.
Here is a tree rooted in African soil nourished with waters from the
rivers of Africa. Come and sit under its shade and become, with us,
the leaves of the same branch and the branches of the same tree.
Sons and daughters of Africa, I declare this inaugural Convention of
Africanists open.
Iswe Lethu I
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Chapter 38
1959: What Is Apartheid?
by
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Nadine Gordimer
Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is
this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent.
What is apartheid?
It depends who’s answering. If you ask a member of the South
African government, he will tell you that it is separate and parallel
development of white and black. If you ask an ordinary white man
who supports the policy, he will tell you that it is the means of
keeping South Africa white. If you ask a black man. . .well, he may
give you any of a dozen answers arising out of whatever aspect of
apartheid he has been brought up short against that day, for to him it
is neither an ideological concept nor a policy, but a context in which
his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed. He could
give you a list of the laws that restrict him from aspiring to most of
the aims of any civilized person, or enjoying the pleasures that
everyone else takes for granted. But it is unlikely that he will. What
may be on his mind at the moment is the problem of how to save his
bright child from the watered don ‘Bantu Education’ which is now
being substituted for standard education in schools for black
children. Or perhaps you’ve merely caught him on the morning after
he’s spent a night in the police cells because he was out after curfew
hours without a piece of paper bearing a white man’s signature
permitting him to do so. Perhaps (if he’s a man who cares for such
things) he’s feeling resentful because there’s a concert in town he’d
not be permitted to attend, or (if he’s the kind of man who isn’t) he’s
irked at having to pay a black market price for a bottle of brandy he’s
debarred from buying legitimately. That’s apartheid, to him.
All these things, big and little, and many more.
If you want to know how Africans—black men and women—live in
South Africa, you will get in return for your curiosity an exposition of
apartheid in action, for in all of a black man’s life, all his life, rejection
507
by the white man has the last word. With this word of rejection
apartheid began, long before it hardened into laws and legislation,
long before it became a theory of racial selectiveness and the policy of
a government. The Afrikaner Nationalists did not invent it, they
merely developed it, and the impulse of Cain from which they
worked was and is present in many white South Africans, Englishspeaking as well as Afrikaner.
Shall I forget that when I was a child I was taught that I must never
use a cup from which our servant had drunk?
I live in the white city of Johannesburg, the biggest city in South
Africa. Around the white city, particularly to the west and north, is
another city, black Johannesburg. This clear picture of black and
white is blurred only a little at the edges by the presence of small
Coloured (mixed blood) and Indian communities, also segregated,
both from each other and the rest. You will see Africans in every
house in the white city, of course, for every house has its servants’
quarters, built not less than a certain minimum regulation distance
from the white house. Sophisticated Africans call this backyard life
‘living dogs-meat’—closer to the kennel and the outhouses than to
the humans in the house. But no black man has his home in the white
city; neither wealth nor honour or distinction of any kind could
entitle him to move into a house in the street where I or any other
white persons live. So it easily happens that thousands of white
people live their whole lives without ever exchanging a word with a
black man who is like themselves, on their own social and cultural
level; and for them, the whole African people is composed of servants
and the great army of “boys” who cart away or deliver things—the
butcher’s boy, the grocer’s boy, the milk boy, the dust boy. On the
basis of this experience, you will see that it is simple for white men
and women to deduct that the black men and women are an inferior
race. Out of this experience all the platitudes of apartheid sound
endlessly, lie the bogus sea from the convolutions of a big shell:
they’re like children. . . they don’t think the way we do. . . they’re not
ready. . .
508
Black men do all the physical labour in our country, because no white
man wants to dig a road or load a truck. But for every kind of work a
white man wants to do, there are sanctions and job reservations to
shut the black man out. In the building trade, and in industry, the
Africans are the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and they cannot,
by law, become anything else. They cannot serve behind the counters
in the shops, and cannot be employed alongside white clerks.
Wherever they work, they cannot share the washrooms or the
canteens of the white workers. But they may buy in the shops. Oh
yes, once the counter is between the black customer and the white
shopkeeper, the hollow murmur of the apartheid shell is silenced—
they are ready, indeed, to provide a splendid market, they do think
enough like white people to want most of the things that white
people want, from LP recordings to no-iron shirts.
The real life of any community—restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, and
coffee bars—has no place for the African man or woman. They serve
in all these, but they cannot come in and sit down. Art galleries,
cinemas, theatres, golf courses, and sports clubs, even the libraries
are closed to them. In the post offices and all other government
offices, they are served at segregated counters.
What it means to live like this, from the day you are born until the
day you die, I cannot tell you. No white person can. I think I know
the lives of my African friends, but time and time again I find that I
have assumed, since it was so ordinary a part of average experience,
the knowledge in them of some commonplace experience that, in fact,
they could never have had. How am I to remember that Danny, who
is writing his Ph.D. thesis on industrial psychology, has never seen
the inside of a museum? How am I to remember that John, who is a
journalist on a lively newspaper, can never hope to see the film I am
urging him not to miss, since the township cinemas are doubly
censored and do not show what one might call adult films? How am I
to remember that Alice’s charming children, playing with my child’s
toy elephant, will never be able to ride on the elephant in the
Johannesburg Zoo?
509
The humblest labourer will find his life the meaner for being black. If
he were a white man, at least there would be no ceiling to his
children’s ambitions. But it is in the educated man that want and
need stand highest on the wrong side of the colour bar. Whatever he
achieves as a man of learning, as a man he still has as little say in the
community as a child or a lunatic. Outside the gates of the university
(soon he may not be able to enter them at all; the two ‘open’
universities are threatened by legislation that will close them to all
who are not white) white men will hail him a ‘boy’. When the first
African advocate was called to the Johannesburg Bar, just over a year
ago, government officials raised objections to his robbing and
disrobing in the same chamber as the white advocates. His colleagues
accepted him as a man of the law; but the laws of apartheid saw him
only as a black man. Neither by genius nor cunning, by sainthood or
thuggery, is there a way in which a black man earn the right to be
regarded as any other man.
Of course, the Africans have made some sort of life of their own. It’s a
slum life, a make-do life, because, although I speak of black cities
outside white cities, these black cities are no Harlems. They are bleak
rectangular patterns of glum municipal housing, or great smoky
proliferations of crazy, chipped brick and tin huts, with a few streetlights and few shops. The life there is robust, ribald, and candid. All
human exchange of the extrovert sort flourishes; standing in a
wretched alley, you feel the exciting blast of a great vitality. Here and
there, in small rooms where a candle makes big shadows, there is
good talk. It is attractive, specially if you are white; but it is also sad,
bleak, and terrible. It may not be a bad thing to be a Sophiatown
Villon; but it is tragic if you can never be anything else. The penny
whistle is a charming piece of musical ingenuity; but it should not
always be necessary for a man to make his music out of nothing.
Some Africans are born, into their segregated townships, light
enough to pass as Coloured. They play Coloured for the few
privileges—better jobs, better housing, more freedom of movement—
that this brings, for the nearer you can get to being white, the less
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restricted your life is. Some Coloured are born, into their segregated
townships, light enough to pass as white. A fair skin is the equivalent
of a golden spoon in the child’s mouth; in other countries coloured
people may be tempted to play white for social reasons, but in South
Africa a pale face and straight hair can gain the basic things—a good
school, acceptance instead of rejection al the way along the line. It is
the ambition of many coloured parents to have a child light enough
to cross the colour bar and live the precarious life of pretending to be
white; their only fear is that the subterfuge will be discovered. But,
the other night, I was made aware of a different sort of fear and a
new twist to the old game of play-white. An Indian acquaintance
confessed to me that he was uneasy because his thirteen-year-old son
has turned out to have the sort of face and complexion that could
pass for white. ‘He’s only got to slip into a white cinema or
somewhere, just once, for the fun of it. The next thing my wife and I
know he’ll be starting to play white. Once they’ve tried what it’s like
to be a white man, how are you to stop them? Then it’s the lies, and
not wanting to know their own families, and misery all round. That’s
one of the reasons why I want to leave South Africa, so’s my kids
wont’ want to grow up to be something they’re not.’
I’ve talked about the wrong side of the colour bar, but the truth is
that both are the wrong sides. Do not think that we, on the white side
of privilege, are the people we might be in a society that had no sides
at all. We do not suffer, but we are coarsened. Even to continue to
live here is to acquiesce in some measure to apartheid—to a sealingoff of responses, the cauterization of the human heart, as well as to
withholding the vote from those who outnumber us, eight to one.
Our children grow up accepting as part of natural phenomena the
fact that they are well-clothed and well-fed, while black children are
ragged and skinny. It cannot occur to the white child that the black
one has any rights outside of charity; you must explain to your child,
if you have the mind to, that men have decided this, that the white
shall have, and the black shall have not, and it is not an immutable
law, like the rising of the sun in the morning. Even then it is not
possible entirely to counter with facts an emotional climate of
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privilege. We have the better part of everything; how difficult it is for
us not to feel, somewhere secretly, that we are better?
Hundreds of thousands of white South Africans are concerned only
with holding on to white privilege. They believe that they would
rather die hold on to it than give up the smallest part; and I believe
they would. They cannot imagine a life that would be neither their
life, nor the black man’s life, but another life altogether. How can
they imagine freedom, who for years have had to be so vigilant to
keep it only to themselves?
No one of us, black or white, can promise them that black domination
will not be the alternative to white domination, and black revenge the
long if not the last answer to all that the whites have done to the
blacks. For such is apartheid that, like many whites, many blacks
cannot imagine a life that would be neither a black man’s life or a
white man’s life.
Those white South Africans who want to let go—leave hold—are
either afraid of having held on too long, or are disgusted and
ashamed to go on living as we do. These last have become colourblind, perhaps by one of those freaks by which desperate nature hits
upon a new species. They want people of all colours to use the same
doors, share the same learning, and give and take the same respect
from each other. They don’t care if the government that guarantees
these things is white or black. A few of these people go so far as to go
to prison, in the name of one political cause or another, in attempts
that they believe will help to bring about this sort of life. The rest
make, in one degree or another, an effort to live, within an apartheid
community, the decent life that apartheid prohibits.
Of course, I know that no African attaches much importance to what
apartheid does to the white man, and no-one could blame him for
this. What does it signify that your sense of justice is outraged, your
conscience troubled, and our friendships restricted by the colour bar?
All very commendable that your finer feelings are affronted—he’s the
one who gets it in the solar plexus. All this lies heavily, mostly
512
unspoken, between black and white friends. My own friends among
black men and women are people I happen to like, my kind of
people, whose friendship I am not prepared to forego because of
some racial theory that I find meaningless and absurd. Like that of
many others, my opposition to apartheid is compounded not only
out of a sense of justice, but also out of a personal, selfish, and
extreme distaste for having the choice of my friends dictated to me,
and the range of human intercourse proscribed for me. I am aware
that, because of this, I sometimes expect African friends to take
lightly, in the ordinary course of friendship, risks that simply are not
worth it, to them, who have so many more basic things to risk
themselves for. I remember a day last year when some African
friends and I went to the airport to see off a close friend of us all. I
had brought a picnic lunch with me, and so had Alice, my friend, for
we knew that we shouldn’t be able to lunch together in the airport
restaurant. What we hadn’t realized was that we shouldn’t be
allowed to sit outside on the grass together and eat, either; “nonEuropeans” were not supposed to be admitted to the lawns. I wanted
to brazen it out, sit there until we were ordered off into segregation; it
was easy for me, I am white and not sensitized by daily humiliations.
But Alice, who has to find words to explain to her children why they
cannot ride the elephant at the zoo, did not want to seek the sort of
rebuff that comes to her all the time, unsought.
Black and white get to know each other in spite of and under the
strain of a dozen illegalities. We can never meet in town, for there is
nowhere we can sit and talk together. The legal position about
receiving African guests in a white house is unclear; we do have our
friends in our houses, of course, but there is always the risk that a
neighbour may trump up a complaint, to which the police would
always be sympathetic. When you offer an African guest a drink, you
break the law unequivocally; the exchange of a glass of beer between
your hands and his could land you both in the police court on a
serious charge. Officially, you are not supposed to enter an African
‘location’ without a permit, and when we go to visit friends in a black
township we take the chance of being stopped by the police, who are
looking for gangsters or caches of liquor, but will do their duty to
513
apartheid on the side. Three days ago I was one of a small group of
whites who had to get up and leave the table at the wedding
reception of an African medical student; a white official of the goldmining company for whom the bride’s father worked, and on whose
property his house was, drove up to inform us that our invitations to
the wedding were not sufficient to authorize our presence in living
quarters provided for Africans.
No friendship between black and white is free of these things. It is
hard to keep any relationship both clandestine and natural. No
matter how warm the pleasure in each other’s company, how deep
and comfortable the understanding, there are moments of failure
created by resentment of white privilege, on the one side, and guilt
about white privilege on the other.
Another life altogether.
Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: Do you want to be
overrun by blacks?
I bump an African’s scooter while parking, and before he and I have
a chance to apologise or accuse, there’s a white man at my side ready
to swear that I’m in the right, and there are three black men at his
side ready to swear that he is in the right.
Another life altogether.
Put the shell to our ear and hear the old warning: Are you prepared
to see white standards destroyed?
A friend of mine, a dignified and responsible African politician and
an old man, is beaten up by white intruders while addressing a
meeting of dignified and responsible white people.
Living apart, black and white are destroying themselves morally in
the effort. Living together, it is just possible that we might survive
white domination, black domination, and all the other guises that
514
hide us from each other, and discover ourselves to be identically
human. The least we could all count on would be the recognition that
we have no more and no less reason to fear each other than other
men have.
--African Seminar
Washington, D.C., 1959
Chapter 39
The History of the Indians in South Africa: A Hundred-Year
Journey
515
by
G. R. Naidoo
The small ship Truro nosed its way into Durban harbour. The
quayside was lined by an excited group of people. A small man with
a black bag in his hand was pacing agitatedly up and down, waiting
for a boat to take him to the ship, which had by now anchored in the
harbour. He was Dr. Helland, the medical officer of Port Natal. He
had to examine the passengers, and was not looking forward to it. He
expected them all to be emaciated and infected with cholera.
The doctor was not on board as long as he had expected to be. He
came off with a broad and satisfied grin. The human cargo was
healthy in every respect.
The date was November 16, 1860—a historic day in South Africa. The
first Indians had arrived in the country. This is how a newspaper of
the day described the arrival: “A very remarkable scene was the
landing and one worth remembrance and record. Most of the many
spectators who were present had been led to expect a lot of dried-up,
vapid and sleepy-looking anatomies. They were agreeably
disappointed.
“As the swarthy hordes came pouring out of the boat’s hold,
laughing, jabbering and staring about them with a very well satisfied
expression of self-complacency on their faces, they hardly realized
the idea one had formed regarding them and their faculties. They
were a queer, comical, foreign-looking, very Oriental-like crowd. The
men with their huge muslin turbans, bare scraggy and thing bones
and coloured garments; the women with their flashing eyes, long
disheveled pitchy hair, with their half-covered well-formed figures
and their keen inquisitive glances; the children with the meager,
intelligent, cute and humorous countenances, mounted on bodies of
unconscionable fragility were all evidently beings of a different race
and kind to any we have yet seen either in Africa or England. Master
Coolie seemed to make himself perfectly at home and did not appear
in the least disconcerted by the novelty of his situation.
516
The arrival of Indians had been preceded by lengthy argument and
negotiation in the Colony of Natal. In the 1850’s, the sugar planters
began making covetous glances towards Mauritius, which had been
enriched by the immigration of Indians a few years earlier. Public
pressure on the Government in Natal mounted, and in 1855, while
Natal was still a district of the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey,
Governor of the Cape, was asked to allow a limited number of
Indians to come.
Though there was an African population of over 100,000 at the time,
they could not be induced to work for long periods on the sugar
plantations. For the most part they were able to raise nearly all they
required on their own lands.
So, after protracted discussions between the Colony of Natal, the
British Government and the Indian Government, the Indian
Legislative Council passed an Act in 1860 providing for the indenture
of Indians to Natal on certain specific conditions.
From 1860 to 1866, there was a steady flow of Indian immigrants to
Natal. Their effect on the sugar industry was soon felt. In 1857 sugar
to the value of £2,000 was exported, but four years after the arrival of
the Indians the figure had jumped to £100,000.
It was generally accepted at the time that the immigration of the
Indians had benefited the country, and that more were needed to
ensure its future prosperity. A large section of the whites wanted the
Indians to achieve greater prosperity in the knowledge that it would
at the same time help the rest of the community. In 1865 one
newspaper said that there was no reason why an Indian should not
be encouraged in his natural wish to make money more rapidly by
working for himself. “In creating wealth, he must benefit the
community in a greater degree. Hence we think the Government
might lay out small plots of land, among those to be allotted to
Kaffirs, for sale to free coolies of course at the upset price. . .”
517
Indians were encouraged to acquire land. A number of them were
allotted land by the authorities at Umzinto after relinquishing their
right to a passage back to India at the end of ten years.
One of the main problems facing the Indians was that of women.
There were too few women among the labourers. The Natal
Government was reluctant to encourage their immigration, but was
forced to allow some for fear that a refusal would stop the flow of
labour to the sugar, coffee and arrowroot plantations.
The planters themselves wanted the number of women to be strictly
limited. But the Indian Government insisted that a definite
proportion of women should accompany each group of men. The
precise number of women was not mentioned in the negotiations
which took place, but it was agreed that women totaling 35 per cent
of the number of men should be allowed to come in the first year; 43
per cent in the second; and 50 per cent in the subsequent years. The
Natal Government, however, was keen to keep down expenses, and
the proportion was later reduced to25 per cent, which remained the
legal minimum during the first period of immigration.
It was often difficult to makeup the proportion of women, and ships
were sometimes held up in India while the Agent (commonly known
as the “Coolie Catcher” at the time) looked around for some. In her
History of Indians in Natal, Dr. Mabel palmer says: “It can be imagined
that under these circumstances the women were not always of the
most respectable type. The Indian Government admitted that the
statutory proportion of women was hardly ever made up without
enlisting large numbers of prostitutes or women of the lowest class in
whom habits of honesty and decency were non-existent. No evidence
was required of legal marriage between a man and the woman who
accompanied him. Indeed, the Coolie Agent in assigning labourers
simply linked together any two convenient individuals and sent them
for indenture as husband and wife. They had, however, to give their
formal consent.
518
There was many a brief union between the men and women
immigrants. Indian marriages, whether contracted in the colony or in
India, were not recognized as legal in themselves in Natal. Because of
this, couples parted after the smallest argument. Women were quite
prepared to have affairs with several men, and some changed
husbands three or four times.
In spite of the large number of African women in the areas where the
Indians worked, there was very little (if any) miscegenation between
them. There are various explanations for this. One lies in the Indian
caste system, which forbids a man to have an affair with a woman
outside his group.
Caste ties in India at the time were very strong. To cross the seas was
strictly taboo to Hindus, and anyone transgressing this rule was
treated as the lowest of the low (Gandhi was excommunicated from
his caste when he went to England to study in his youth). The bulk of
indentured immigrants, however, were drawn from the Sudra caste,
the lowest of the four main strata in the Hindu caste hierarchy. Many
of them, on landing in Natal, assumed caste names, such as Singh,
Pillay, Naidoo, Maharaj, thus breaking through the “caste barrier.”
They were reluctant to do anything which might jeopardize their
new-found “status”
In addition, there were religious, cultural and sociological differences
separating the Indian and African.
The Indian labourers had other troubles too. Some of the first
immigrants returned to India in 1871 after completing the five years
of indenture and the five years of free labour with complaints that
they had been flogged and ill-treated by their employers.
The Government of India said that it could not allow emigration to be
resumed until it was assured effective measures had been taken to
ensure that the immigrants received proper protection in Natal. This
statement led t the appointment of the Coolie Commission, which
519
reported in 1872 that there was no general systematic bad treatment,
though there were certainly isolated instances of deliberate ill-usage.
Laws were passed to satisfy the Government of Indian, and
immigrants began coming into the country again. At their own
request, they were no longer referred to officially as coolies,” but as
Indians.
As the years went by, the immigrants slowly became assimilated into
their new society. Though a stead flow of people returned to India
after their period of indenture, most immigrants remained. At the
same time, more and more were brought into the country to satiate
the labour thirst of the sugar farmers. Some Indians were employed
on the railways.
A number of the immigrants took to farming in a small way after
completing their indentures.
There was some mild opposition to the presence of the Indians, but
the majority of people in Natal saw them as a valuable addition to the
economy.
Some Indian traders began to arrive. Free immigrants also appeared,
mainly to trade. Some Indians who had made good in Mauritius and
were looking for fresh fields emigrated to Natal and opened
businesses. The traders were called “Arabs.”
These traders spread throughout Natal, and their presence was felt
by the whites, who had until then conducted their businesses without
any real competition. Some whites were forced to close down. One
magistrate reported: “There are, including Arabs chiefly, 37 males
and 13 females, in all 50 Indians, in this district. These are resident in
Pomeroy, and are either shop-keepers or hawkers, carrying on trade
with the Natives around, selling many ploughs, hoes or picks,
blankets, beads, inferior classes of clothing, and fancy articles for
wear. Nearly all the £5,865 2s. 7d. money orders obtained for the year
ended 30th June, 1892, was paid in by these Arab shop-keepers.”
520
Ill-feeling against the Indians grew as they made their mark in
business. They were accused of insanitary habits and unfair
competition. A commission was appointed in 1887 to investigate
various allegations. One of the recommendations of the commission
was that indentures should terminate in India, which meant that an
immigrant could come to the country only for his period of
indenture.
This suggestion was opposed by some whites as well as the Indians.
A Mr. J.R. Saunders, who had for years tried to help the immigrants,
said this of the proposal: “What is it but taking the best out of
servants and then refusing them the enjoyment of their reward—
forcing them back (if we could but we cannot) when their best days
have been spent for our benefit.”
While the whites agitated about unfair trading and insanitary habits,
the Indians complained about harsh treatment on some of the estates.
On one estate on the South Coast, there was a private police force
which prevented workers from leaving to complain to the magistrate.
There were five suicides on this estate on one day.
The suicide rate amongst Indians was very high. On the North Coast
of Natal some of the older men still talk of “suicide trees”—trees
from which more than one man had hanged himself.
From 1893, a definite pattern seemed to be establishing itself in the
legislation passed in Natal. The few rights of the Indian people were
being slowly whittled away, with no benefits being given in return.
II
The white mob was in an ugly mood. They didn’t like the mild-mannered
Indian barrister who had come back to South Africa to lead his people in
their struggle. “Hang old Gandhi on the sour apple tree,” they cried as they
hurled stones at him. But Gandhi was to survive that ordeal, and many
others, to become one of our century’s great men.
521
In May, 1893, a young, inexperienced barrister, who was to change
the course of Indian history, landed in Natal. At that stage the name
of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was quite unknown. He had left
India many years before to study in Britain, and had returned to set
up a legal practice in Bombay.
The practice, however, proved a failure. He waited for months before
getting his first client, and when he rose to argue in court, his nerve
failed him, and he could not utter a word.
He then decided to open an office in Rajkot, his home town, but there
too he made little headway. Suddenly he got an offer from Dada
Abdulla & co., of Durban, to come to South Africa to appear on their
behalf in a case. He jumped at the opportunity.
Thus it was that the slightly-built young man, wearing a fashionable
frock coat, carefully pressed trousers, shining shoes and a turban
arrived in Durban. Little did he realize that this “short visit” was to
last nearly 20 years.
The first thing he sensed in Durban was that all Indians were looked
down upon by the whites as pariahs. They were called coolies or
samis. Gandhi himself was referred to as the “coolie barrister.”
A few days after his arrival, he was taken to the Durban law courts,
where a magistrate ordered him to remove his turban. Gandhi
refused, and left the court. He later wrote to the Press about the
incident, which became widely publicized. Gandhi was referred to by
some people as the “unwelcome visitor.”
After staying in Durban for about a week, he left by train fro Pretoria
in connection with the law suit. When the train reached
Pietermaritzburg, a white passenger in the first class compartment
complained to railway officials that he would not sit next to a
“coloured.” Two officials asked Gandhi to move to a third class
522
compartment. He refused. A constable was called, and Gandhi was
pushed off the train with his luggage.
He went into the third class waiting room, taking his handbag. His
other luggage was picked up by railway authorities. It was a bitterly
cold night, but he did not ask for his overcoat, which was in his other
bags, for fear of being insulted again.
The room was dark, and the lone figure sat freezing through the
night. A new Gandhi was being shaped in that dismal room.
The following morning Gandhi sent a long telegram to the General
Manager of Railways complaining abut the way he had been treated
by the police and railway authorities.
Waiting till night, Gandhi boarded a train to Charlestown, on the
Transvaal border, from where he had to take a stagecoach to
Johannesburg. All the other passengers on the coach were white, and
he was made to sit with the coachman. He pocketed this insult, and
sat meekly outside. On the way the white conductor, who was inside,
wanted to smoke, and as he was not allowed to do so inside, he
ordered Gandhi to sit on the dirty piece of sacking on the foot-board
so that he could take his seat. Gandhi refused and the conductor hit
him. It was only after some of the white passengers had intervened
that Gandhi was left in his place.
In Pretoria, Gandhi’s main concern was the law suite, but his sense of
social justice led him to summon the local Indians to a meeting,
where he urged them to revolt against discrimination. He also asked
them to observe truthfulness in business and reminded them that
their homeland would be judged by their actions.
He also appealed to them to forget all distinctions of caste and
religion, to adopt more sanitary habits, and to learn to read and write
English.
523
Gandhi had no intention then of remaining in South Africa. He
thought that, having aroused some political consciousness in the
people, he could return to India as soon as the law suite ended.
Indians in the Transvaal at that time were worse off then those in
Natal. They had no franchise, were allowed to own land only in a
special location, and could not move out of doors after 9 p.m.
Gandhi himself, however, had been exempted from the curfew
regulations. One evening, while taking his usual walk in Pretoria, he
strolled past the home of President Kruger, where the policeman on
duty pushed him off the pavement and kicked him. An English
Quaker, a Mr. Coates, who was passing by, urged Gandhi to institute
proceedings against the constable, and offered to give evidence.
Gandhi refused, saying that it was against his principles to go to
court to further a personal grievance.
Early in 1894 Gandhi completed his work in Pretoria, and returned to
Durban to prepare for his departure to India. A farewell party was
arranged for him at Sydenham. While he was thumbing through a
newspaper at the party, he saw a paragraph under the heading
“Indian Franchise.” It referred to a Bill before the House of
Legislature seeking to deprive Indians of their franchise. In those
days Indian men were allowed a vote under the original Charter of
Natal, subject to certain property and educational qualifications.
There were between three and four hundred Indians on the roll.
Gandhi immediately understood the ominous implications of the Bill.
He advised the people at the party to resist every effort to
disenfranchise them.
A meeting was later held at the home of Abdulla Haji Adam, said to
be the richest Indian in the country at the time, to plan a campaign of
action. The leader of the Indian community, Sheth Haji Muhammad
Haji Dada, was elected president of the committee. Among those
who pledged their support were Mr. Subhan Godfrey, headmaster of
a mission school, a Mr. Paul, a court interpreter, and a number of
524
merchants, including Dawud Muhammad, Muhammad Kasam
Kammuddin, Adamji Miyakhan, A. Kolandavelu Pillay, C.
Lachhiram, Rangasami Paciachi, Amod Jiva and Parsi Rustomjee.
The Bill had already passed its second reading. Telegrams were
immediately sent to the Speaker of the Assembly requesting him to
postpone further discussion on the measure. Telegrams were also
sent to other leading figures. A petition was drawn up to be
presented to the Legislative Assembly, but nothing could stop the
Bill, and it was passed.
Gandhi then organized a monster petition of about 10,000 signatures,
and sent it to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in London. The
Natal Government pointed out that the Bill had gone through its final
stages without any dissident vote, but the Colonial Office refused to
give the consent necessary to make the Bill a law.
Because of the important role he was taking in Indian affairs, Gandhi
was asked by friends to remaining Natal permanently. They offered t
pay him for his services. Gandhi agreed to stay, but said he would
not take money for public work. He asked, however, that members of
the community should guarantee him legal work to the extent of £300
a year, which was what he felt he needed to maintain a household in
keeping with his position as a barrister.
This assurance was gladly given, and Gandhi settled in Natal.
He applied to the Supreme Court of Natal for admission as an
advocate. His application was opposed by the Law Society of Natal,
but he was admitted after some delay.
Gandhi’s office was on the corner of West and Field Streets, and his
home was in Beach Grove, near where the Durban law courts are
today. Mr. Harry Escombe, who was then Prime Minister of Natal,
lived opposite.
Gandhi later moved his offices to Mercury Lane.
525
Three Durban Indians, who were employed as clerks by Gandhi, are
still alive. They are Mr. Vincent Lawrence, Mr. J. Royeppen, now an
advocate, and Mr. J. W. Godfrey, also an advocate.
Mr. Lawrence has some interesting recollections of his days with
Gandhi. There was the Balasundarum case, for instance.
Balasundarum was a Tamil indentured labourer One day he entered
Gandhi’s office in tattered clothes and with two front teeth broken
His mouth was bleeding. Gandhi, who could not understand Tamil,
asked Lawrence to get a statement.
Balasundarum was serving his indenture under a well-known
Durban European, who had thrashed him so severely for some trivial
offence that two teeth had been broken.
Gandhi took Balasundarum to a doctor and secured a certificate. He
then went to a magistrate and filed an affidavit. He finally had
Balasundarum’s indenture transferred to another European.
The case received widespread publicity, both in South Africa and
abroad, and from that time the indentured Indians looked to Gandhi
as their protector, the man who would listen t their troubles and
would fight their battles. They had troubles enough under the
system, which some people saw as virtual slavery.
In face of the continued anti-Indian feeling and legislation, Gandhi
felt that the only way his people could achieve anything was by
forming a permanent political body to carry out sustained protest. As
a result, the Natal Indian Congress was formed on May 22, 1894.
Meanwhile, there was a growing competition between free Indians
and whites in commerce and other spheres. The Natal Government
again asked the Government of India to agree to the indenture of
Indians being terminated in India. The request was rejected. The
Natal Government wanted to limit the growth of the Indian
population by the measure.
526
In 1896, Gandhi left South Africa to bring his family from India.
While in India he addressed meetings, wrote articles and gave
interviews on the problems of his people in Natal. A garbled version
of his statements was cabled to South Africa, and incensed the
whites, who got the impression that he was returning to South Africa
with nearly 800 free Indians in two ships.
The whites held large protest meetings, and demanded that Gandhi
and the free Indians should be prevented from landing. They
threatened that if the Natal Government failed to stop the
immigrants, they would take the law into their own hands.
When the two ships arrived at the Port of Natal, they were kept in
quarantine for 23 days. Many passengers were in fact old residents of
the country. Notices were served on the passengers by a committee of
whites warning them that they would be pushed into the sea if they
attempted to land.
After a time, however, the white leader appealed to his followers not
to prevent the landing, saying they had given sufficient expression to
their feelings, which would make a profound effect on the Imperial
Government.
The Indians were allowed to land. Gandhi’s family was sent to the
home of Parsi Rustomji, an old friend, but Gandhi was advised to
remain until evening, when he would be escorted home by the
Superintendent of Water Police. In the afternoon, however, he was
persuaded by a friend, Mr. F.A. Laughton, Q.C., to go ashore with
him.
It was about half-past four when Gandhi and Mr. Laughton began
their walk. The whites who had come to protest at the landing had
left, but there were still some sightseers at the port. A few white
youngsters recognized Gandhi, and began shouting: “Gandhi!
Gandhi! Thrash him!” Part of the crowd threw pebbles at them.
527
The two lonely figures walked on, the crowd gradually growing.
Laughton, realizing the danger, hailed a riksha, but the puller was
warned by the crowd that if he carried them, he would be beaten up.
By the time the two men reached West Street, there was a huge
crowd around them. Suddenly a burly man ran forward and pulled
Mr. Laughton away from Gandhi. Gandhi was showered with stones
and whatever else the mob could lay hands on. His turban was
knocked off. He was nearly unconscious, but the mob kept pelting
him, singing “Hang old Gandhi on the sour apple tree.”
Fortunately, a Mrs. Alexander, wife of he Superintendent of Police,
came on the scene and saw the cowardly attack. Opening her
umbrella, she shielded Gandhi and helped him to the police station.
Gandhi refused to take shelter at the police station, and proceeded to
Rustomji’s house, where his family had gone, without any further
mishap.
Later, about a thousand whites gathered outside the house and
demanded that Gandhi be handed over to them. Rustomji was
warned that if he did not hand over Gandhi, the house would be
burnt, with all the occupants inside. Just then Superintendent
Alexander arrived. He sensed the angry mood of he crowd, and got a
message through to Gandhi that he should address himself as an
Indian constable and leave the building. Gandhi did so, and escaped.
While Gandhi was get ting away, Alexander was leading the mob of
whites in a sing-song. When the crowd later found that Gandhi had
gone, they dispersed.
The British Government was incensed at the way Gandhi had been
treated, and the Secretary of State, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, cabled
the Natal Government demanding that it prosecute the assailants and
see justice done. Gandhi, however, refused to prosecute.
528
In the meantime, fresh steps were taken in South Africa to restrict the
immigration of Indians and to impose further disabilities on those in
the country. The subsidy of £10,000 for the introduction of
indentured labour was withdrawn, and in 1897 an Act was passed
prohibiting free immigration to Natal, except under certain
conditions. At first the conditions were made easy, but they became
more difficult in 1903.
After the war, Gandhi at last returned to India, promising that he
would come back to South Africa if the people needed him.
Indian hopes that their conditions would improve after the war
proved to be false. When the Transvaal became a British Colony,
Indian grievances were soon forgotten. Instead, the provisions of
Law No. 3 of 1885 were enacted. In terms of this legislation, Indians
were forbidden to own fixed property, except in special areas. In
addition, restrictions were imposed on the movement of Indians from
Natal to the Transvaal.
In 1903, Gandhi was asked by the Indian people to return to South
Africa. He did return, and set up a practice, this time in
Johannesburg.
In 1904 he established the Phoenix Settlement, which was inspired by
the idea of forming a class of people dedicated to working the lands
and to handcraft. It was his belief that man could achieve his greatest
peace by such work. Gandhi acquired a 100-acre site for the
settlement. It was decided that everybody on the settlement should
be taught typesetting in addition to working the land. This, it was
believed, would enable them to live full and satisfactory lives.
Again, during the Zulu rebellion of 1906, Gandhi formed an
ambulance corps, which did invaluable work among the wounded
tribesmen, who would otherwise have had no skilled attention.
III
529
This is the story of a hundred years of Indian progress; a saga of a people. It
tells of the lives of dozens of ordinary men and women whose courage and
convictions made them rise to the ranks of heroes: How a people loved its
country and yet struggled against the injustices and discriminations that
were perpetrated in that country’s name. This is the tale of the followers in
the great tradition of Gandhi, and of their hopes for tomorrow.
The hundred years since the arrival of Indians in South Africa is a
story punctuated with hardship, tears and joy. We have had colourful
heroes, both men and women, who have added a touch of
romanticism to our history in South Africa. Some of them have been
great political leaders; some simple folk dedicated to a cause; some
business tycoons; some ordinary men and women whose stories have
never been told, even some gangsters who have added their own
sinister glamour.
A lot has happened during our first hundred years in South Africa. In
spite of the immense setbacks we have had in our political struggles
and the almost monotonous regularity with which anti-Indian laws
have been passed, we can still look back with a sense of pride and
achievement.
In practically all the different phases of our history, individuals stood
out as martyrs and heroes. The world knows of the greatest of them
all, Mahatma Gandhi, who gained his political inspiration in South
Africa, and whose theory of passive resistance brought India its
independence. But there were lesser heroes the present generation
scarcely knows.
One of he most outstanding in our early history was a woman who
gave her life for the cause of her people. She was Villiamah Mudaliar,
the daughter of a Johannesburg labourer. Valliamah was a mere wisp
of a woman who was imbued with the spirit of Gandhi and his
passive resistance movement. She served her first term of
imprisonment at the age of sixteen and when she returned from her
term of imprisonment, she contracted a fatal fever.
530
It was on February 22,1 914, that Gandhi was summoned to her
bedside. He could not help but brush aside a tear when he saw the
tall girl, her body emaciated beyond description. Though she was
dying, she had a flicker of a smile on her girlish face. “Valliamah, you
do not repent of your having gone to jail?” asked Gandhi.
“Repent? I am even now ready to go to jail again if I am arrested,”
replied the girl. Gandhi was deeply moved by the simple and sincere
words of a girl dedicated to his faith. He later told friends that if he
had only a dozen Valliamahs, the cause of the Indians would be won.
Valliamah hovered between life and death after her last conversation
with Gandhi. But within a few days she died.
Gandhi paid the following moving tribute to her: “She built her
temple of service with her own hands and her glorious image has a
niche even now reserved for it in many a heart. And the name of
Valliamah will live in the history of South African Satyagraha
(Passive Resistance) as long as India lives.”
There were several others who stood out during the great political
campaigns of Gandhi. One other was Ahmad Muhammad Kachhalia
of Johannesburg. Kachhalia was an unostentatious piece-goods trader
from the Transvaal who rose to become a respected leader of his
people through sheer honesty and his determination to do the
Indians in South Africa a service without any personal reward.
In some of the most difficult times in the Gandhian era, Kachhalia
was elected a “captain” by Gandhi. He cheerfully accepted jail in the
cause of his people. The greatness in Kachhalia became apparent
when white creditors put the squeeze on him to dissuade him from
campaigning with the political firebrand Gandhi. Kachhalia owed
large sums of money too white firms and, though his credit was the
best in the country, the companies demanded that he meet his dues
immediately. It was suspected that the white traders were instructed
to start their campaign of persecution by the government of the day.
531
The affected firms told Kachhalia that they would not press for
immediate payment if he left the Satyagraha movement. Kachhalia
would have no truck with the suggestion that he give up politics. He
told his creditors that his participation in the struggle was his
personal affair. He considered that his religion, the honour of his
country and his own self-respect were bound up with the struggle.
He assured them, however, that their money was safe, and that as
long as he was alive, he would repay them in full, at any cost.
A meeting of creditors was held in the offices of Gandhi at the
beginning of 1909. With the consent of Kachhalia, Gandhi invited the
creditors to take over the business if they wished. If this did not
satisfy them, the creditors could take over the stock at cost rice and if
an part of their dues still remained unpaid, they would be free to take
over the book debts sufficient to cover the deficit. But the merchants
were not out to seek justice. They were out to bend Kachhalia.
When he would not waver from his stand, insolvency proceedings
were instituted against him and he was declared insolvent.
Bankruptcy amongst Muslims was considered an unpardonable sin,
but his insolvency only enhanced Kachhalia’s prestige among the
community. Within a year after being declared insolvent, Kachhalia
paid his creditors twenty shillings in the pound.
A completely unknown indentured labourer played one of the most
dramatic and dangerous roles during the Boer War. He was
Parbhusingh of Ladysmith, who formed part of a small Indian
settlement in the town. When the Boer War was at its height, the
officer in command at Ladysmith assigned various duties to every
resident of the place, irrespective of his race. A most dangerous and
most responsible task was assigned to Parbhusingh.
The Boers had stationed a long-range gun, known n those days as the
“pom pom,” on a hill near Ladysmith. The gun was doing a great
amount of damage, both to property and to lives. Because of the
antiquity of the weapons used in those days, there was an interval of
over a minute from the time the guns were fired to the time its shells
532
hit the town. If the townspeople received warning immediately the
gun was fired, they had the opportunity to take cover and save their
lives.
Parbhusingh was allotted the task of sitting on a huge tree and
ringing a bell the moment he saw the flash of the gun on the hill. It
was realized that the role given to him was a very dangerous one. He
perched himself on the tree and without fail sounded the bell each
time he saw the flash of light. A number of lives were saved because
of his heroic devotion to duty.
The story of Parbhusingh’s bravery was soon known in Natal. In his
own simple way he typified the spirit of the ordinary indentured
Indian labourer of his days. They were not cowards. The Viceroy of
India, Lord Curzon, send a Kashmir robe for presentation to
Parbhusingh and asked the Natal Government to carry out the
presentation at a public ceremony. The unknown man from
Ladysmith was given a civic presentation by the mayor of Durban.
To many of the early Indians, South Africa was a land of promise.
And people were prepared to achieve their ambition even at the risk
of their lives and the lives of their children.
An ………. Muni Gadu, left South Africa with his two sons and
daughters to settle in India under the repatriation scheme. In terms of
the scheme, an Indian who sought voluntary repatriation could
return to South Africa within a three-year period.
When he arrived in India, he discovered that his relatives had left the
district in which they lived and he was not able to trace them. He
remained in India for a while, but decided to return to South Africa
within the stipulated time of three years. The man found that the
money in his possession could only purchase tickets for his family
and himself to Dar-es-Salaam.
This did not deter him. He bought tickets to Dar-es-Salaam and from
there wrote to the South African Ministry of Interior for financial
533
assistance to enable him to proceed to Durban by ship. Financial help
from the South African government was refused.
The father, two sons and daughter were bent on returning to Durban.
This was the only home they knew. With no money in their
possession, the family started their long trek from Dar-es-Salaam to
Durban by foot.
The trip was hazardous. The man walked with his children through
forests infested with wild animals, passed through areas of tropical
disease without being immunized, and swam across the many rivers.
They saved themselves from starvation by eating herbs and fruit.
After several months of walking, they arrived at the Natal border.
Instead of the welcome they expected, they were arrested. The
distraught family who risked life to get back to what they thought
was their home, were declared prohibited immigrants and put on
board the next ship to India.
One of the pioneer teachers amongst Indians was Mr. Henry
Nundoo. In 1886, he published a book titled “Light of Knowledge” in
Hindu and English for use by Indians learning English. In the preface
to the book, Mr. Nundoo said: “The reader will find this book an easy
introduction to the English language, either with or without the aid
of a teacher.”
It was, however, not as easy as Mr. Nundoo made it seem. Six years
after his book was published, an Education Commission was set up
by the Government to go into the education needs of Indians. This
commission recommended that “the Protector of Indian Immigrants
should correspond with the proper authorities in India with a view
to securing for the Colony the services of efficiently trained teachers
capable, not only of conducting a central school for “coolies,” but also
of preparing young men to become teachers at the schools on the
plantations.”
534
The first fully-qualified woman teacher was brought from India to
Natal in 1889. She was Mrs. S. P. Vedamuthu, who was brought by
the St. Aidan’s Mission to teach in one of the two girls’ schools then
established.
The first contingent of fully qualified Indian teachers to lecture in a
College was imported from India in 1904. They were Rev. D.
Koilpillai, B.A.(Principal), Samuel Jesudas, B.A., Gnanamuthu
Thungasamy, B.A., and Samuel Joseph, F.A. And from these humble
beginnings in the field of education, the community has produced
men and women who have excelled themselves in all fields.
Standing out amongst the hundreds of unknown and unsung heroes
of our century was a young father who gave his life in saving others
from certain death.
It happened during the great floods of the Umbilo River. After the
deluge, the river was a mass of swirling water which took everything
in its wake. Families living in the low-lying lands were swept out to
sea. Some were rescued, but others met a watery grave. Helpless men
and women stood in silence on the hills overlooking the river,
bearing witness to this tragedy. There were poignant scenes as
mother cried out for help and offered all their possessions as reward
for their rescue as they clung to rooftops which were being tossed
about like corks in the water.
A young father stood within reach of the edge of the water clasping
his infant son, horrified at the sight. Not more than twenty yards
away, a mother—with her own child held tightly to her bosom—was
being swept away. The mother was quietly sobbing as she realized
that nobody would dare undertake her rescue. Suddenly the man on
the river bank set down his little son in safety, and dived into the
water fully-clothed. He reached the near-drowning mother and child
and brought them safely to shore. But before the hero could climb the
bank to safety, he lost his footing, slipped back into the river—and
was swept away.
535
As was detailed in previous stories by DRUM on Indians in South
Africa, a mass of laws restricting Indians in many ways were
introduced from time to time by the different governments. While
Gandhi was in South Africa, he led the struggle of the people as an
undisputed leader. But after the withdrawal of Gandhi and the
passing away of the co-workers, the community was in need of a new
leader.
It was at this time that Abdulla Ismail Kajee filled the gap. There
were many who did not agree with the politics of the late “A.I.,” as
he was popularly known, but he did make a significant contribution
to the history of the Indians in South Africa. Some called him a
“quisling” and a “seller-out” of Indian interest, whilst some said he
possessed rare quality of statesmanship and that, had he been white,
he would have been Prime Minister.
A.I. had a stormy political career and eventually managed to lead the
Natal Indian Congress and its parent body, the South African Indian
Congress and its parent body, the South African Indian Congress. He
concluded several agreements with the government of his day. But he
was often accused by his opponents of looking after the interests of
the rich at the expense of the poor.
He led Congress through difficult times until he was finally ousted
from office together with his colleagues n 1946, when the
“Progressives” took over. Kajee was an embittered man, but this did
not lead him to forsake politics. He was too deeply engrossed in it
and for some months acted as a freelance, still retaining his contact
with members of the Government. During discussions with Mr. H.G.
Lawrence of the Smuts Government, he collapsed and died a few
hours later.
A.I was the stormy petrel of Indian politics in South Africa, but even
his opponents admit that he was devoted to his cause, though that
cause deviated from the policy of his opponents and the vast majority
of the people he tried to represent.
536
For the first hundred years of our existence in South Africa, Indians
can certainly boast of having produced men and women of
outstanding quality and caliber. We have shown that we are not
cowards in times of need. We did not allow running political battles
with government of the country to overshadow a natural loyalty and
patriotism to South Africa.
Indians have often been accused of being bad South Africans, but we
have made our contribution in both the great wars. Indians fought
alongside other South Africans on the battlefields of Africa and
Europe.
The main criticism of Indians in South Africa, in the early years, that
has some weight, is that we lived in a cultural vacuum. We had very
few poets and authors, writers and musicians. Despite the fact that
we struggled against racialism, it is also fair to say that for most of
the early part of our hundred years of history of our existence we
have been as racialist as other sections in this race-conscious country.
It has only been in the past few decades that we have seen signs of a
revolution in our social life. There have been changes in our political
outlook, our social outlook, our cultural outlook, and in every aspect
of our lives, Indian society is now beginning to play its full part in the
modern world of today.
IV
It is 1907. The “Black Act,” imposing harsh restrictions on the Indian
population, is passed in the Transvaal. This proves the last straw, and a
passive resistance movement sweeps the country under the leadership of
Gandhi. In spite of the hardships involved, even women and the aged rush to
take part. Then comes the Smuts-Gandhi agreement. G.R. Naidoo recalls
here those momentous days.
The Transvaal was in a turmoil. Agitation against the Indians had
been increasing.
537
Then, early in 1907, the Transvaal was granted responsible
government, and Parliament rushed through the Asiatic Registration
Act. The Bill was to become law on July 1. The law provided for
anyone without a certificate to be imprisoned, fined or deported from
the Transvaal.
The Indian people were determined to defy the law.
And thus began the passive resistance campaign. A new political
“weapon” had been born.
The Indian people swarmed to the banners, courting arrest.
The authorities were at their wits’ end. During Christmas week of 190
they ordered some of the leading men in the movement—including
Gandhi, Mr. Leuing Quinn, the leader of the Chinese community of
Johannesburg (the Act also applied to Chinese) and Mr. Thambi
Naidoo, also of Johannesburg were to appear in court to show cause
whey they should not be ordered to leave the Transvaal. Each of the
men was later ordered to leave, but none of them did so, and all were
consequently jailed.
Instead of intimidating the population, the trials sparked off even
greater enthusiasm than before. After the sentences had been passed,
an exultant crowd, carrying black flags, marched through the streets.
Within a week no less than a hundred people sought imprisonment
for some minor breach of the law.
It was at this time that Mr. Albert Cartwright, editor of the
“Transvaal Leader,” began to mediate in the dispute. General Smuts
welcomed this intervention, as he was worried about the momentum
the movement was gaining. Mr. Cartwright suggested a
compromise—which was either drafted or approved by Smuts—
providing for the Indians to register voluntarily.
On January 30, 1908, Gandhi was remove from the Pretoria Prison
and taken to see General Smuts. Smuts reiterated that the Black Act
538
would be repealed as soon as there was voluntary registration in
accordance with the terms of settlement. Gandhi was set free, with
the promise that the other prisoners would be released the next day.
Gandhi wanted to be the first to register voluntarily, but there was
some opposition to the plan. Some of those close to Gandhi feared
that the agreement might not be honored. There was also malicious
gossip that Smuts had bribed Gandhi with £15,00 to sell the Indians.
The Pathans, a fighting tribe of Indians, warned Gandhi that anybody
who registered would be killed.
One Pathan, Mir Alam, attempted to fulfill this threat, with Gandhi
as the victim. On the morning of February 10, as Gandhi was going to
take out his registration permit to honour his agreement with Smuts,
he was accosted by Mir Alam and some other men, who demanded
to know what he was doing. Gandhi had scarcely finished replying,
when he was struck on the back of the head. He crumpled to the
ground, and was kicked and hit by the incensed Pathans, who were
arrested soon afterwards while running away.
Gandhi was removed semi-conscious to the home of a Mr. Doke, a
Baptist minister and friend of his, but even while in that condition he
asked that the registration papers should be brought to his bedside.
He also wrote to the Attorney-General asking for the release of Mir
Alam and his companions as he did not want to prefer charges
against them. Despite Gandhi’s pleadings, the Pathans were
sentenced to three months’ hard labour.
The Pathans were eventually proved to be right in their argument
that the Government could not be trusted. Although a number of
Indians had registered voluntarily, General Smuts maintained the
Black Act on the statute book.
In face of this flagrant breach of promise, the Indians sent an
ultimatum to the Government that if the Asiatic Act was not repealed
in terms of the settlement, the people would burn their certificates.
539
A mass meeting of Indians was held in the grounds of the Hamidia
Mosque in Johannesburg on August 16, 1908, the day on which the
ultimatum expired. Every inch of space in the grounds was filled. In
one corner, on a platform, was a large cauldron in which it was
intended to burn the registration certificates. Just as the meeting was
about to begin, a volunteer dashed up and handed a telegram to
Gandhi. It was from the Government and said that the authorities
“regretted the determination of the Indians,” and were unable to
change their line of action.
At the end of the meeting more than 2,000 certificates were soaked in
paraffin and set ablaze by Mr. Essop Mian of Johannesburg.
In addition to the Black Act, another inroad had been made into the
civil liberties of Indian of the Transvaal—during 1906—when the
Transvaal Immigrants Restriction Bill was passed. It treated as
prohibited immigrants those who could pass education tests but were
not eligible for registration under the Asiatic Act.
The Indian people decided to use passive resistance against the
Immigrants Law too.
There were several Indians in Natal who possessed the right to stay
in the Transvaal. The resisters decided that two classes of Indians
should enter the Transvaal as part of their campaign—some traders
who had previously lived there and some “educated” ones. The
traders, led by Daud Mahomed, president of the Natal Indian
Congress, were arrested on the Transvaal border, and served a threemonth sentence at Volksrust.
The movement began to increase rapidly. Hundreds of Indians from
both Natal and Transvaal courted imprisonment, and the jails were
filled. The resisters were drawn from all walks of life. There was
Imam Abdul Kadar Bavazir of Johannesburg, who defied the law
despite his very delicate health.
540
Another was the Cambridge-graduate barrister, Joseph Royeppen,
for Durban, who left his law books, took up a basket of vegetables,
and was arrested as an unlicensed hawker. Even youngsters, like 14year-old Mohanial Manji Ghelani, who also went to jail.
Gandhi himself was arrested and sent to jail in Pretoria, where he
was put in solitary confinement.
Then the Government began deporting people to India in an attempt
to crush the campaign. Many of the victims of this inhuman measure
were poor folk. The Indian people denied the Government’s right to
deport people, and successfully fought it on legal grounds.
In the meantime negotiations were afoot for the formation of Union
and Gandhi and some of his followers went to England to try to settle
the Indian question through the British Government, who were at the
time discussing Union with General Smuts and General Hertzog. He
was unsuccessful, and on his return to South Africa he removed the
Transvaal passive resisters to “Tolstoy Farm,” a settlement on similar
lines to the one established at Phoenix to encourage people to work
on the land. The farm was the property of Mr. Kallenbach, and was
placed at the disposal of resisters.
Gandhi, although married had by that time taken a vow of celibacy,
and looked on his wife as a sister rather than a wife. He was very
easily disturbed at any sign of his followers having “evil thoughts,”
as he put it, about sex.
There were both males and females at Tolstoy Farm, and Gandhi
watched them with the eyes of a hawk. The boys and girls slept
around him, and he arranged their beds in a certain order to try to
ensure that there was no misbehaviour. One day one of the lads at
the settlement passed a remark at two of the women. Gandhi heard
about it, and clipped off the long, beautiful hair of the two girls as a
“sign of warning to every young man that no evil eye might be cast
upon them.”
541
Gandhi had had similar problems at the Phoenix Settlement. One
day, while in Durban, he received an urgent message that there was a
sex scandal at the settlement. He rushed to Johannesburg, and was
told that an unmarried woman was pregnant. The man who was
responsible was a close relative of Gandhi’s. Gandhi went on a fast,
presumably to atone for the act of his followers.
Passive Resistance was now being conducted on a small scale only.
Neither the Indians nor the Government was prepared to make any
concessions.
About the time there was a ruling by Mr. Justice Searle in the Cape
Supreme Court that only marriages solemnized according to
Christian rites and registered by the Registrar of Marriages were
legal. By a single stroke of the pen, Justice Searle had reduced most
Indian wives to concubines.
Indian women clamoured to go to jail in protest against the ruling
and against the Government’s failure to fulfill new promises made in
1912 to repeal the Black Act and abolish the £3 tax. Eleven women
from the Transvaal were selected to break the law. But try as they
would, the authorities refused to arrest them.
The resisters decided to give the campaign a renewed spurt by
getting Natal women to enter the Transvaal and Transvaal women to
cross into Natal, all without permits. The Transvaal women would
try to persuade Indian coal miners at Newcastle to go on strike.
The Natal party was arrested, and the members were sentenced to
three months’ imprisonment for breaking the provincial barriers on
September 23, 1913. The women from the Transvaal were not
arrested, however, and they went on to Newcastle, where they got
the coal miners to strike. These women were then arrested, and were
also sentenced to three months in jail.
One of the Johannesburg women died shortly after her release from
jail. She was sixteen-year-old Valiamma R. Munusami Mudaliar.
542
Meetings were held throughout the Transvaal to pay tribute to this
brave young woman who was said to have sacrificed her life for the
cause of her people.
The strike at Newcastle started off with only a few hundred men
taking part, but it was not long before four thousand were out on
strike. On the advice of Gandhi, they left their mine compounds after
their employers had tried to intimidate them to go back to work. The
number swelled to about six thousand when workers from other
industries joined them.
Gandhi realized that he could not keep his “army” inactive in
Newcastle, so he organized a mass march into the Transvaal, in
defiance of the immigration laws, to bring things to a head. The
march began in thick mist on the morning of October 28, 1913. It was
the biggest protest march the country had ever seen. Led by Gandhi,
small and frail, the men, women and children were hailed in every
little dorp and town on their way to the Transvaal from Newcastle.
Each person was on a ration of a pound and a half of bread and an
ounce of sugar per person per day.
Two of the women in the group lost their children on the march. One
child died of exposure, and the other was drowned when it fell from
the arms of its mother while crossing a stream.
Throughout this historic march, Gandhi was attempting to reach a
settlement before finally crossing into the Transvaal. Just before they
reached the border, General Smuts was phoned and asked to abolish
the £3 tax. In a conversation with the General’s secretary, Gandhi
said: “Tell General Smuts that I am fully prepared for the march. . . .
If he promises to abolish the £3 tax, I will stop the march, as I will not
break the law for the sake of breaking it, but I am driven to it by an
inexorable necessity.”
He received a curt reply: “General Smuts will have nothing to do
with you. You may do just as you please.”
543
It was November 6, 1913, and the time 6:30 a.m. The multitude of
marchers turned towards the East, offered their prayers, and began
the last stages of their march to the Transvaal.
The Volksrust whites had threatened to shoot any Indian who
crossed into the Transvaal, but they did nothing when the resisters
eventually entered, dirty, disheveled and exhausted at five that
evening. That night Gandhi was arrested, and was released on £5
bail. He rejoined his contingent the next morning. A number of the
aged or ailing volunteers were left at Volksrust with Indian
merchants.
Gandhi was again arrested at Standerton, and allowed £50 bail.
Between Standerton and Greylingstad, Gandhi was arrested for a
third time, and taken on warrant to Dundee, where he was accused of
inducing miners to go on strike. Polak was charged with the duty of
leading the resisters.
Gandhi was tried at Dundee and sentenced to nine months’
imprisonment. He was then taken to Volksrust to appear on the
charge against him there. He found both Kallenbach and Polak also
under arrest at Volksrust. Each was sentenced to three months’
imprisonment.
The rest of the army were also arrested, and were taken to Natal,
where they were imprisoned. The Government then proclaimed the
mine compounds as out-stations of the Dundee and Newcastle gaols,
and appointed the white staff as warders.
But the floodgates were now open, and soon thousands of labourers
on the sugar estates of Natal went on strike. The Government
adopted a policy of blood and iron. Mounted military policemen
chased strikers and brought them back to work. Several were killed
by the police, and many were wounded. All the leaders of the Indian
struggle were arrested.
544
The eyes of the world were now focused on South Africa. Smuts
could no longer handle the situation. He was finding it difficult and
embarrassing to keep thousands of resisters in jail. A commission
was eventually appointed. Before beginning its sittings, it requested
the unconditional release of Gandhi and two whites involved in the
resistance. Mr. Kallenbach and Mr. Polak. The three were let out of
prison after having been held about six weeks.
The Commission unhesitatingly recommended the abolition of the £3
tax and that non-polygamous marriages should be registered by the
immigration offices in each province, thus meeting most of the Indian
demands on this matter.
There were several meetings between Smuts and Gandhi after the
commission had announced its findings. This resulted in an
agreement, known as the Smuts-Gandhi agreement, which was
enshrined in a series of letters between the two men. Smuts
introduced the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which abolished the £3 tax;
settled the marriage question by recognizing Hindu, Mohammedan
and the Parsee marriages; and provided for the immigration of the
wives and children of Indians living in the Union. The provincial
barriers, however, were not removed, though Indians born in South
Africa before August 1913 were allowed to enter the Cape.
Gandhi had achieved most of what he had set out to do in South
Africa, and decided that it was now time for him to go back to India.
Before leaving, in July 1914, he was feted by the Indian people.
As a parting gesture to his political adversary, Smuts, Gandhi
presented him with a pair of sandals he had made in prison. Smuts
wore the sandals on his farm for many years, and returned them to
Gandhi in 1939, on the Indian leader’s 70th birthday
Following the Smuts-Gandhi agreement, it was hoped that the
voiceless Indian community would be treated fairly as members of a
settled population of South Africa. But this was not to be.
545
V
The anti-Asiatic agitation grows worse. Then, in 1927, Cape Town
Agreement is reached.
During the years 1910 to 1920, the position of the Indian in South
Africa changed from that of a serf to a wage earner. At the same time,
the “Indian menace” bogey was kept constantly alive. Many whites,
fearing Indian economic competition, looked for any excuse to attack
them. They alleged that the Indians always sent their money out of
the country; that they were a danger to public health because of their
“unclean habits;” that their presence depreciated the value of
property in a neighbourhood; that their trading and business
methods were “foreign” to the country.
Then, in 1925, Dr. Malan, Minister of the Nationalist-Labor Coalition,
introduced the Areas Reservation and Immigration and Registration
(Further Provisions) Bill, which envisaged the rigorous residential
and commercial segregation of Indians in Natal.
This legislation raised a great storm of protest among the Indian
people, who were being led by the South Africa Indian congress,
which had been formed in 1920. The concerted opposition to the Bill
led Dr. Malan to refer it to a Select Committee. After continual
pressure from Indian, however, a conference was called at which a
delegation from Indian met leaders of the South African
Government.
As a result of these talks the Cape Town Agreement was published in
1927.
In terms of the agreement, India agreed to accept voluntary
repatriates from South Africa if the Union Government paid their
passages. The Union Government undertook to drop the Areas
Reservation Bill and to provide for the cultural and economic uplift
of the Indians who remained in the country.
546
The agreement, however, was essentially a compromise, and
achieved very little. This Union Government expected that Indians
would submit to voluntary repatriation in large numbers, while the
Indian people expected that conditions would be improved for those
of them who wished to remain.
From August 1927, when the agreement came into operation, until
the end of 1940, only 16,201 Indians took advantage of the
repatriation offer.
In spite of the weight of the forces against them, the Indian people
were unable to achieve unity among themselves. There was a serious
split in Congress in 1933, and a settlement was reached only in 1939.
There was trouble the following year again, however. There was an
outcry at the time that Indians were penetrating into white areas and
thus devaluing white properties. The Lawrence Committee, which
included representatives of the Natal Indian Community, was set up
with the purpose of dissuading Indians from buying land in white
areas.
The participation of the A. I. Kajee group of Congress in the
Lawrence Committee led the “progressive bloc” (often referred to as
the leftwing group) to revolt against them.
The white cry of “penetration” continued, and finally the committee
was disbanded in the face of a demand that legislative restrictions
should be instituted to stop Indians from buying in white localities.
The Government then appointed the Broome Commission to
investigate the question of Indian penetration. As a result of its
report, which said that Indian penetration was increasing, the
Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction
Bill was passed in 1943. This Act became known to Indians as the
Pegging Act, and was widely opposed by Indians both here and
overseas.
547
But even this legislation was not considered adequate to control the
Indian people, and in 1946 General Smuts introduced the Asiatic
Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill.
And thus the tussle went on, with no sign by the whites that they
were prepared to treat the Indian people as human beings entitled to
decent rights. There seemed to be no end to the discussions and
negotiations on the Indian people. Another compromise settlement
followed—the Pretoria Agreement. The Indian Congress led by Mr.
Kajee and Mr. Pather, agreed that their people would buy land for
investment purposes only in white areas, but not for occupation. This
raised a storm of protest from the poorer section of the people, who
accused Congress of “selling” them out so that the wealthy would be
able to invest in white areas. The signing of the Pretoria Agreement
brought an open split in Congress. An Anti-Segregation Council was
formed, headed by Dr. Naicker and his progressive bloc. The Council
had only 15 members on the Natal Indian Congress Committee,
while the “Kajee-Pather Group” had 125.
The council urged co-operation with other non-white groups.
Hostility grew between the two Indian groups. Matters came to a
head in August 1945, when members of the Anti-Segregation Council
applied to court for an order directing the committee of Congress to
hold an annual general meeting. The council felt that Congress was
afraid of allowing members to discuss its policy, and was evading an
annual meeting. The court found against the Congress officials.
When the annual meeting was held in terms of the court order, the
people returned the Anti-Segregation men to power. The
progressives had now taken over the running of the Congress. The
“Old guard” later formed the Natal Indian Organisation, which still
exists to this day.
The Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill was passed
in 1946, and the Indian Government, at the request of the Indian
Congress, severed diplomatic relations with South Africa. One of the
548
reasons for this decision was the fact that the Union Government had
refused a request to hold a Round Table Conference.
Congress denounced the Bill as the “Ghetto Act.” It felt that
determined measures were needed to oppose it, and it was decided
that a passive resistance campaign should be launched.
The campaign began when people occupied a piece of land in the
Umbilo area of Durban. Soon afterwards the tents of some resisters
were burnt down by white hooligans.
As the campaign got under way, some people sought arrest by
entering the Transvaal without a permit. The resistance snowballed,
and nearly 2,000 Indians, including about 300 women, went to
prison. There was never any lack of volunteers.
Another major step taken by the new Congress was the decision to
place the “Indian question” before the United Nations Organisation.
The issue is still brought up regularly at the United Nations, where
the majority of nations have constantly attacked the treatment of
Indians in the Union.
The coming to power of a Nationalist Government in the Union in
1948 brought a number of fresh blows to the Indian people.
One of the most crippling was the Suppression of Communism Act in
1950, which led to almost their entire leadership being banned from
political activities at one period or another. Even people who had
never been members of the Communist Party—while it was still
legal—were affected.
The Group Areas Act was also mooted in 1950. Indian leaders
immediately attacked the measure, pointing out that it could mean
the economic strangulation of a community which had played a vital
part in developing the country. There seemed little doubt among the
Indian people that the Act was aimed primarily at them.
549
In 1952, the Indian Congress, in cooperation with the other non-white
Congress movements, began the Defiance Against Unjust Laws
Campaign. A number of whites also took part in the campaign,
which has come to be recognized as one of the most important
milestones in the non-white political struggle in South Africa.
What the Indian people are fighting for most is the recognition that
they are a part of the South African people. To the vast majority of
them, South Africa is the land of their birth, the only country they
know as home. It is the country on which they base all their hopes for
themselves and their children.
550
Chapter 39
From Veld to the City: The Bantu Drama
by
Anthony Sampson
Cutting through the middle of the lives of the black people of South
Africa is one of the swiftest and sharpest breaks in the history of any
race. It is the crossing from the placid, Stone-Age existence of the
tribal reserves to the bustling, twentieth-century cities of modern
South Africa—Johannesburg, Durban or Capetown. It is a contrast
that lies inside the minds, to a greater or lesser extent, of all black
South Africans. This contrast is at the very core of the current South
African crisis, for as firmly as the Government of Dr. Verwoerd
believes that the native people should remain in their primitive tribal
state, so do the natives themselves desire passionately and
unchangeably to become part of the modern cities.
To white observers, indeed, the metamorphosis of the Africans from
the country to town is the most fascinating aspect of South Africa.
The image of the blanketed tribesman, with bare feet, tribal scars and
plugs in his ears, arriving bewildered and innocent in the middle of
industrial Johannesburg is one which runs through the white
literature of South Africa with a repetition that irritates the Africans
themselves.
William Plomer’s “Ula Masondo,” Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved
Country,” Mopeli-Paulus’ “Blanket Boy’s Moon” all have the same
basic theme. More recently, Lionel Rogoain’s film called “Come Back,
Africa,” shot in Johannesburg last year, has the same tribal hero.
The theme is, undoubtedly, an evocative one, but it is perhaps less
simple than it appears. Educated Africans, who resent the white
551
men’s dramatizations of their tribal antecedents, suspect that the
writers’ interest is based on the old myth of Rousseau’s “noble
savage”—the quest for some imaginary innocence which
sophisticated man has lost. They argue that their own transition has
been no more abrupt than that of the English of Shakespeare’s time—
the “country gulls” who swagger into Elizabethan plays. Above all,
they suspect that nearly all white men prefer their Africans to be
primitive and untouched, and like to think that black men cannot be
assimilated into white cities. In fact, the African intellectuals say,
most white men believe in apartheid in their hearts.
Certainly, few white visitors could fail to be attracted by the outward
appearance of life in the tribal reserves. Only a hundred miles from
the industrial cities of Port Elizabeth or Durban, you can see the
clusters of plain mud huts, with nothing but grass mats for furniture,
and old women pounding maize with tree stumps outside. A Xhosa
girl, her hair wound into a headdress of red clay, and her brown arms
jangling with rings, walks by the side of he main road, balancing a
pitcher on her head, staying erect and unworried as the Chevrolets
and jaguars swish past her.
To the nerve-racked white business men living their complex urban
lives, it is hardly surprising that the tribal Africans stand for all the
peace the miss is their own existence.
Their tribal life appears magnificently unchanged. The community is
dominated by two ancient leaders: the chief and the witch doctor.
The chief, it is true, has not the gaudy splendor of the West Africans,
with their umbrellas, embroidered gowns and rich jeweled
headdresses. A South African chief is likely to wear white man’s
mufti, or a vague, cast-off uniform with only a ceremonial blanket, a
leopard skin or a shield to signify his status. But the chiefs retain a
splendid dignity and apparent authority: they rule through a
gathering of elders, and when important issues arise they hold a
special meeting of the tribe, or kyotla, which constitutes a kind of ad
hoc democratic process. On festive occasions, they hold a beer-drink,
552
sitting around the floor of a mud hut, and passing a calabash of
home-brewed beer from man to man.
There are many aspects of this tribal life that are endearing. There is
the responsibility of it—the sense of duty to the family, the chief and
the tribe. There is the courtesy, the consideration and the dignity of
individuals, particularly old men and women. There is the laughter,
the peasant wisdom, and the straightforward human values. Even
the witch doctor, hung with bones, hides and bangles, is far from a
figure of fun. He is, as a missionary doctor will tell you, a homegrown psychoanalyst who can, in a society riddled with fears and
superstitions, cure a psychosomatic illness when Western medicine
has failed.
But in this attractive-looking community, there is one indication of a
fatal flaw: there are no young men, and even among the older
generation there is a vast disparity between men and women. The
reason is obvious: the dry, cracked land cannot support the men.
They go, as soon as they reach manhood, to earn their livings in the
gold mines of Johannesburg or the kitchens of Durban, and to send
back money to their families.
The lack of men has corrupted the character of tribal life. The pivot of
the community is no longer the chief’s court, but the little hut, which
exists in every small community, called Wenela—from W.N.L.A., the
initials of the Witwatersrand Native Labor Association, the
organization of mine-owners which brings 400,000 Africans every
year to the gold mines.
They are taken in train loads for six- or nine-month contracts, and
come back with new suits, hats and phonographs. They leave for
second contracts and then, perhaps they take permanent city jobs and
never come back again.
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They leave behind them a community demoralized by their absence.
The land, eroded and poor as it is, is not properly cared for. The
women without their husbands, become undisciplined, promiscuous
or prey to mysterious mental diseases and imagined pregnancies.
Families are disorganized, and the children are often brought up by
an aged grandfather or a drunken uncle. Above all, the country
remains desperately poor. The 13 per cent of South African land on
which the 3,000,000 tribal Africans live was never enough to sustain
them, but the system of migratory African labor, while it provides the
reserves with pocket money from remittances, insures that the
country areas can never be developed properly.
Doctors, however, more than economists, are the ones who can
perceive the true misery of the tribal reserves. To the mission doctors
who deal with underfed children, fear-ridden mothers and miners
sent back with TB, there is nothing romantic about tribal life; it is
nasty, brutish and short.
The main cause of African migration is necessity. Every since Cecil
Rhodes devised a poll tax for rural Africans to insure a labor supply
for his diamond mines in Kimberley in the Eighteen Seventies.
Africans have been forced by taxes and poverty to go to work in the
cities.
But even without compulsion, many of them would go; it is more
than poverty that brings Africans to Johannesburg from as far away
as Nyasaland or Mozambique. All the lure and the glory of
Johannesburg—Geols, the Golden City—is summed up for Africans in
two letters—“TJ,” standing for “Transvaal Johannesburg”—on the
number-plates of Johannesburg cars. As the big cars screech past the
dry mud huts, the little pot-bellied Zulu or Xhosa children dance up
and down with delight, and shout, “Tee Jay! Tee Jay!”
“TJ” stands for everything that is exciting: not only cars, but
skyscrapers, trains, elevators, cinemas and radios. “TJ” stands for
everything that the young tribal recruit sees as he gazes out at the
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street from the Johannesburg station. But “TJ” does not mean only
the half-million whites of Johannesburg and the white en’s wonders;
indeed, it is noticeable that the raw Africans are never quite as
astonished by the “houses on wheels” or the “huts on top of each
other” as the white men expect them to be. No, “TJ” means more than
anything else the black metropolis—the city with 700,000 Africans,
the biggest black city in the continent.
It is a very different place from white Johannesburg, and to the
Europeans it seems far less attractive than the reserves. The
“locations’ or “townships,” where the Africans live are mostly
clusters of boxlike brick houses, beginning ten miles southwest of the
city center in the area known as the “Orlando Complex,” and
spreading over the brown hillsides in bleak, unvarying rows, like
huge chicken farms.
The locations, although they have become more hygienic and less
slummy in the past few years, are uniformly dismal. The houses are
all single-story, built at minimum cost. Although there is a large
power station near by, the rooms in the African townships have no
electric light. The roads are unpaved, full of ditches and boulders.
The largest building in most locations is the police station, with the
administrative offices of the location superintendent next door.
The skyline of bungalows is unbroken, except for billboards
advertising, beauty cream, corn flakes, or flashlights (“Be safe at
night—carry a torch!”) One house is distinguished from another only
by its number: a typical African address is 3586B, Orlando West
Extension, Johannesburg. The country Africans call a boy born in the
city “the son of a number.”
But to the Africans who live in Orlando—so named before the war,
after a paternalistic city councilor who laid out the “model
township”—there is nothing impersonal about their city. In spite of
the police raids, the mass removals and the pass laws designed to
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circumscribe and control their daily lives, they love the city, and out
of it they have built a new and vibrant society.
The streets which seem so impersonal and bleak to the white visitor
have, to the Africans, all the nuances and variations of Manhattan or
Mayfair. The extensions and postal districts, or the townships named
by the municipality after tribal heroes are quickly renamed by the
Africans after snob white districts or American Negro heroes, like
“Killarney,” or “Satchmo.” Many of the bleak numbers turn out to be
“shebeens,” or illicit African drinking places, with names like
“Falling Leaves,” “Back o’ the Moon” or “Thirty-Nine Steps.”
The shebeen might be taken as the cornerstone of this new
metropolis, for it is here that the new society is most vocal and
expressive. The contrast with the chief’s beer-drink in the reserves is
a bizarre one. Instead of the chief and elders, sitting on the mud floor,
passing a calabash around, the superior shebeens have a mixture of
teachers, bus drivers, nurses and gangsters, sitting around a polished
mahogany table, drinking European brandy under a kerosene lamp.
There is little connection with the old society: a teacher might turn
out to be a chief’s nephew, but descendants of the old Zulu royal
family are quite likely to end up as messenger boys or domestic
servants. The conversation in a shebeen will not be about tribal
customs or chiefly intrigue, but about Hollywood films, football, jazz
or Shakespeare. If some newly arrived innocent, perhaps, raised the
subject of tribal ritual, he might well be met with a shout of, “Jeez,
man, go back to the kraal! We don’t want blanket-boys here.”
There are, of course, many tribal relics embedded in this new society,
particularly among the newly arrived groups. Some, like the Basutos
or the Vendas, still in their multicolored blankets, stride through the
crowds as if they were among their native mountains.
Tribal myths and superstitions still play their part in urban life. Five
years ago a story suddenly became current that a tokoloshe—a kind of
Zulu imp—had been discovered in Johannesburg, and for two weeks
556
copies of the local African newspaper, The Bantu World, were sold
out with stories of the tokoloshe—which turned out to be an otter.
Sometimes the tribal relics are of a grimmer kind, as when a
homemade liquor brew is discovered with bits of flesh mixed init,
supposed to strengthen the courage of its drinkers. Witch doctors still
do business in Johannesburg, in musty little shops hung with skins,
bones and medicines: and when a paramount chief such as King
Cyprian of the Zulus or King Sobhuza of the Swazis comes up to
Johannesburg, he is besieged by humble tribesmen and guarded in
his small location house by bus drivers or municipal clerks.
These tribal memories are often said by whites to be a sign that
Africans will never be assimilated into city life, and the Government
of Dr. Verwoerd has done everything possible to encourage the
continuance of tribal feeling, with special “ethnic grouping” in the
layout of the townships, and special entries in the passbooks for each
person’s chief and tribe.
But to hundreds of thousands of urban Africans these subdivisions
mean nothing: some of them have lived for three generations in the
towns, have intermarried among tribes, and speak English and
Afrikaans at home. For them, it would be as unthinkable to return to
the reserves as for the Afrikaners to return to Holland.
The black cities of South Africa are kept separate from the white cities
by all the elaborate devices of apartheid. By day the Africans work in
the same offices, factories or shops as the white men, and jostle in the
same streets: but every night they are separated, and travel in their
segregated trains to their segregated townships.
To the whites, the lives of their black office boys or chauffeurs seem
unimaginably separate and isolated from their own. Although
African jazz has lately become fashionable among white liberals, very
few white South Africans have ever made their way into a shebeen,
and even to be found drinking with an African constitutes an offense.
But to the urban Africans, the “Europeans” are the ones who seem
557
isolated, in their remote and hidden mansions in the superior
suburbs. The Africans no longer feel themselves reliant on white
patrons or promoters for their education and cultural development;
they see themselves as the heirs of Western civilization, and the
“Europeans” as the imposters.
In much of the black metropolis, there is a fearful rootlessness—the
other side of the imbalance which shows itself in the reserves. There
are too few girls, no land, no freehold rights, broken families; often
husbands who work as domestic servants are not allowed, because of
the Group Areas Act, to sleep with their wives. And all the time, the
townships are subject to the perpetual insecurity which comes from
the police state—the threat of being waked at midnight for not
having a pass, of being exiled to the farms, of being jailed indefinitely
or suspected political views.
All these factors have produced ugly elements in the African
townships—violence, gangsters, promiscuity and wild drunkenness.
They show themselves at their worst each Christmas-time when,
maddened with liquor and frustration, the wilder Zulus and
Bansutos engage in atavistic faction fights, and a score or so are
murdered.
But against these grimmer sides, there is much that is infinitely
exciting and hopeful about this African “Harlem.” “The truest
optimism in South Africa,” wrote the greatest of South Africa’s
historians, Dr. DeKlewlet, “is in the crowded, disease-ridden and
crime-infested urban locations.” Anyone who spends some time in
the shebeens or social gatherings of Orlando, Meadowlands or
Sophiatown can understand what he means. The Africans have not,
as a race, been demoralized b the white men’s cities; they have taken
to them with all the enthusiasm of a London Cockney, and in them
have built their own society, hierarchies and prides.
Hundreds of thousands of the new Africans are no longer men of two
worlds, but of one—the world of the city, their city. One of their
varied backgrounds—motorcars, blankets, cinemas, witch doctors,
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physicians, chiefs, lawyers—they have forged something new,
confident and civilized.
Signs of this new amalgam take many forms: the new African jazz
blending old monotonous tribal chants with sharp new rhythms from
America; the all-African musical “King Kong,” which appeared last
year in Johannesburg and will come to New York next year; the
young African writers and journalists who have produced a jazzy,
expressive English of their own; even the curious Johannesburg
wedding ceremonies, with their mixture of tribal courtesy. Western
formality and all-African prolixity.
But the new character can be seen most simply in the urban Africans
themselves. Though the whites may view them as clowns, dandies,
imitative monkeys, the Africans are fundamentally confident—of
themselves, and of their right to Western civilization. The more one
sees of them, the more one feels that Dr. Verwoerd, who is
determined that they shall have no place in the white men’s cities,
has bitten off more than he can chew.
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Chapter 40 The Creator of King Kong Jazz Opera by Mona Glasser The musical—which seems to have lost its earlier designation of musical comedy—has developed from the comic opera world of Balkan principalities and Cinderella heroines and now aims at a higher artistic level. Although retaining many of the features of burlesque, vaudeville and comic opera from which it sprang and the elements of song, dance and humour that these media thrived upon, the musical began in the depression years of the early thirties to have a more serious purpose. Nowadays the musical is often an expression of the sociological times, and it seemed the ideal way to present the life story of Ezekiel Dhalamini. Harry Bloom, an author best known for his novel Episode which won the British Authors’ Club Award for 1956, describes in the King Kong programme the tremendous success of the Township Jazz concerts, and the encouragement they gave to African artists. But, says Harry, the events ‘were merely the first step, playing a similar role to the old Coon shows which anticipated the great flowering of Negro music in the United States’. The Township Jazz series had reaches a plateau and the need for greater expression became obvious. ‘And so the idea of a jazz opera grew. It would not only present the music, but the colour and effervescence—and the poignancy and sadness—that make up the peculiar flavour of township life. When I read of the trial 560
of King Kong I saw that here was the story I had been waiting for. From then on’, writes Harry, ‘everything has led straight to tonight’. Indeed everything did lead to the opening night but ‘straight’ is hardly the word for the endless ‘King Kong crises’, the obstacles that were overcome before opening night—some of them of a typically Johannesburg nature, others a reflection of the wider South African scene, yet others of the usual theatrical kind. In lat 1957 Harry Bloom together with members of what came to be called the creative group. Clive Menell, a young and imaginative business executive, went with Harry to the Union to find subjects for portraits he wished to paint and was introduced to Todd Matshikiza, the composer with whom Harry was working on the King Kong story. Harry’s idea at the time was to write a series of vignettes strung together by a calypso‐style singer with a guitar. Clive, interested, offered Todd and Harry the use of his studio. At the home of Clive Menell and his wife, Irene, who were to give endless help and encouragement to the project, Harry Bloom and Todd Matshikiza, now joined by architect‐painter Arthur Goldreich, would meet. In the romantic atmosphere of a lovely studio‐room with its striped woven curtains, easel and points, records and piano, they would visualize (and act out) many of the separate scenes, characters, sequences, and facets of the story they wished to produce, and the aspects of the black man’s life they wished to portray. At that time, however, Harry left, having decided to practice law in Cape Town. The bearded and volatile Arthur Goldreich was the catalyst through whom ideas and inspiration would flow at the story sessions in the studio. He would rush about playing everyone’s part. He would arrive on an imaginary bicycle, leap off and be the character who had been waiting for him, return to his bicycle and ride off again only to 561
reappear as a bootlegger, shebeen queen or whatever was called for at that moment. Todd Matshikiza, born at Queenstown I the Cape Province, was one of a family of ten whose lives were surrounded by music. They all sang or played and Todd grew up with a sure musical instinct which found expression in composition. There are a few composers who are not forced by society to earn a living in other ways and Todd was no exception. In turn he had been bookseller, messenger, waiter, and journalist and was currently a salesman for a firm selling razor‐blades. All this time, however, he continued to develop his musical talent. Music flowed from within, and his varied experience enabled him to appreciate the struggles of King Kong, and to translate them into melody. ‘It grew in those days, ja, just after Harry had left for Cape Town,’ said Todd in an interview, ‘just by talking and feeling the story. We’d talk, piling up the ideas, discussing backwards and forwards, and that’s how I wrote the music. Gee, it was great.’ Some months later Harry Bloom, passing through Johannesburg, went along to the Menell’s home to see how things were developing. Clive had written an outline in which the story of King Kong was related against the background of a township day starting with everyone waking up and going about their activities, and closing with people coming from work, night setline and people going to sleep. Filled with excitement and enthusiasm Harry rushed home and, in the two nights we was in Johannesburg, typed out a 40‐page script delineating sequences, situations and characters. But Harry left again, and the remaining ‘creators’ asked journalist Pat Williams to take over the script of the show, which was then known in reference to the shebeen of the play as ‘Back o’ the Moon’. Pat had 562
a full‐time job and a home and family to look after, and was reluctant to accept. Finally, however, she was persuaded. During the following months she wrote about four drafts of the play and completed many of the lyrics. While these developments had been taking place Ian Bernhardt, behind the scenes and in his capacity as kingpin of the promotional body, was committing himself and the Union of Southern African artists to an opening night in February 1959. What was to be the biggest success in south African theatrical history was, at this time, the biggest risk and it was Ian who steam‐rollered the project through to its ultimate realization. The Union had long previously decided to work with the African Medical Scholarships Trust Fund which was conceived in 1949 as a reaction to the withdrawal of Government bursaries for Africans at the University. The appeal of King Kong was immediate and the two organizations decided to set up a joint ‘King Kong Committee’ of representatives of the Fund and of the Union. Together they would take on the production and share the profits. The only available stage in Johannesburg with sufficient facilities to handle King Kong was the Great Hall of the University of the Witwatersrand, an ideal launching place for such a project since it is one of the few venues in the country where, appropriately enough, a mixed audience could enjoy the product of a mixed creative team. The hall was booked for February 1959 and many tentative arrangements made with players and artists. Leon Gluckman, one of the foremost men of South Africa’s developing theatre, was invited to produce the play. Leon had spent much time studying, producing and acting abroad but had always been certain, in the midst even of his successes there—as Assistant 563
Director of the Nottingham Playhouse and in seasons acting with the Old Vic in Australia and England—that he would ultimately work in South Africa. ‘To be born in South Africa is a boon’, he has said, ‘because to work here is to be in a position to express whatever talent you have—however big or small—to the fullest. This is not to say that conditions are ideal, that there is much hope of finding well‐
equipped stages or a choice of experienced actors or technicians.’ Leon can, and often does, devise his own sets and plot his own lighting script. Theatrical ‘business’ is at his fingertips and he has been in turn actor, manager and producer. In England his successes would be personal ones; in the South African setting he can create taste and if he has also to create the circumstances in which to realize his aims it is only one more challenge to face. For Leon the most interesting straight play does not offer the challenge of a work which has a coherent lyric‐theatre form; which goes back to the classical Greek synthesis of words, music and movement and which embodies dancing, costumes, setting, lighting. ‘In a musical’, Leon feels, ‘one can go for the big effect. The emphasis is on the visual concept rather than on the interpretation of a single line.’ His talents could be fully expressed in a production such as King Kong for he has the ability to manipulate large forces and a flair for spectacle, for a wide canvas made richer by attention to the smallest detail, for movement across a broad stage of many people. The invitation to produce this musical was a step towards the realization of his creative ideals, and he immediately indicated that he would need the assistance of a musical director and a choreographer. He suggested people with whom he had worked before, Stanley ‘Spike’ Glasser, the South African composer who was in his final year at Cambridge, and Arnold Dover who had been teaching ballet in Johannesburg for many years. 564
Spike Glasser had spent some years studying composition in Europe and, like Leon, had always felt that South Africa was home and Johannesburg his backyard. His love for the bright, hard quality of the city could find no permanent satisfaction in the gentler English scene and he was excited by the invitation to direct the music of King Kong. A few years previously he had followed up an ever‐present interest in the indigenous music of Africa by working with Hugh Tracey at Msaho, the centre of the African Music Society. On a hilltop outside Johannesburg, Msaho nestled among red rocks typical of the Transvaal scenery. Here, during lunch‐hour discussions with a colleague, he had decided to return to England to read for the Music Tripos at King’s College, Cambridge. Arnold Dover, who was to be the choreographer, has been connected with the theatre for as long as he can remember. He was born in Sheffeld in 1914 and came out from England for the 1936 Empire Exhibition—before that he had been a principal dancer for Espinosa’s British Ballet—and decided to remain in South Africa. Arnold established a dancing‐school in Johannesburg and before long was one of the leading choreographers and teachers in the country. Over the years he has been connected with more than forty shows, apart from the choreography and direction of about twenty‐five ballet seasons. Arnold’s stage experience goes beyond choreography and dancing. Lighting, curtains, props, and the endless ‘back‐stage’ complications are within his province. He was also to be the stage director of King Kong. The ever‐calm appearance of Arnold, with his curious dancer’s walk, belied the vitality and enthusiasm which he brought to any undertaking. Leon Gluckman had worked with Arnold Dover and Spike Glasser before on an intimate revue called Xmas Box, the first production of its kind in South Africa; which they had staged in 1949. They knew each other’s work and the three felt a warmth in the promise of an association in yet another first production of its kind. 565
Yet the raw material for the production was nowhere near working shape and it was not until September 1958 when Spike Glasser returned to South Africa that he first heard the music that had been written. At the home of Clive and Irene Menell he met a small, dapper man with a wonderfully bright smile that wrinkled his entire face. This was the composer Todd Matshikiza and with him was Mackay Davashe whose Newgate fringe framed a large head set on a lithe body. Mackay was leader of the Township Jazz band, the Jazz Dazzlers. His wide‐apart eyes were topped by a broad brow which gave him a look of constant expectancy. Spike was impressed by Todd’s music, and thought that the various numbers showed a wide range of musical emotion and imagination. There was a variety of idioms, all of them, however, natural to the South African scene. ‘The title song King Kong’, said Spike, ‘is an excellent mutation of the African idiom and the American musical song. Very often, as in “The Earth Turns Over”, there is a natural and original construction of form. “The Death Song” has proportions of magic opera greatness, while “Back o’ the Moon” has undertones of a leading South African urban dance rhythm. “Sad Times, Bad Times” is an instrumental piece of the most sad and serious nature, and could have been written nowhere but in South Africa.’ Spike was given a rather muddled account of the story and saw that there was still a great deal of work to be done on it as well as on the music. That same evening Spike and I were part of a large audience watching the newest in a series of fund‐raising Township Jazz 566
concerts in the Bantu Men’s Social Centre at the bottom of Eloff Street. Eloff Street is a synthesis of Johannesburg life, disgorging at one end streams of people from the main station. People who come into the city in trains marked with separate signs for Blacks Only and for Whites Only, descend on to platforms for Blacks Only and Whites Only, and leave through exits for Blacks Only and Whites Only. In the main shopping street of the city with its highly decorative shop‐
window displays, are good which gangsters siphon into the flourishing Black Market of the townships—a Black Market in reverse, since numbers of brand‐name articles can be obtained for as little as a third of their normal price. The restaurants, hotels and cinemas all ‘Reserve the right of admission’ which is another way of saying ‘for whites only’. But the southern end of Eloff Street descends into ‘motor‐town’ and beyond this are the factories and mine‐dumps, and here the black man comes into his own again. Between motor‐
town and the railway line is the Bantu Men’s Social Centre—where Ezekiel Dhlamini had his first taste of fighting with cushions—a dingy brick building which plays a vital part in catering for the social needs of the half‐million blacks who live in and around Johannesburg. On the same side of the street and a few yards up is Dorkay House, a once‐smart office building on the top floor of which are the offices of the Union of Southern African Artists. Here, at almost any time, one can meet some of its 600 members. Rehearsing in groups, singing, playing or lounging about, gathering warmth and companionship from having a place where they belong. Through the dingy windows, cracked and stuffed in places with newspaper or cardboard, can be seen the large display windows of a car dealer. Revolving perpetually on a platform is an opulent, gleaming car with a neat tag announcing the price‐‐£4,500. The concert was Spike Glasser’s reintroduction to the world of African jazz which had in presentation, content and originality 567
evolved amazingly in the four years he had been away. There were more good players, a new freedom of improvisation. The command of style, harmony and tone was greater and the technique of the instrumentalists had benefited from lessons and experience. A hall crowded to a capacity with Africans, interspersed with a handful of whites, enjoyed a varied programme. Thee was a constant interplay between audience and performers. The audience responded not in decorous applause at the end of the items, but by yells of encouragement, ‘Go, Go’, throughout the number. An eight‐piece band, the Jazz Dazzlers were the mainstay of the programme, whether backing vocalists or giving spirited orchestral versions of their own, or of popular American numbers. Spike realized that the music for King Kong would have to be orchestrated and arranged not only for the instruments available but for a jazz group whose main activity was pure improvisation. A few could barely read music, and the parts would have to be graded to suite the talents of the players. Some of them like Mackay Davashe (tenor‐sax), Kiepie Moeketsi (alto‐sax and clarinet) and Sol Klaaste (piano), were accomplished musicians who could hold their own in any jazz ensemble in the world. Others would have much to learn before their home‐grown talent could emerge in a professional ensemble such as the King Kong band was to become. In October Leon Gluckman, who was doing a season in Cape Town, received the script and asked Harry Bloom to work on it once more. Time was the most vital factor. Rehearsals were due to begin at the end of November, and in October Harry flew up to Johannesburg to meet Spike. For two nights they sat up deciding the musical layout of the show. Todd’s numbers were roughly divided into ‘types’ and, on paper, a fair balance of slow‐to‐fast, choral‐to‐solo or ensemble, orchestral‐to‐vocal numbers was arranged. The revised plan necessitated additional work for Pat Williams who had already 568
completed many of the lyrics, working in close collaboration with the composer. Harry left for Cape Town with an almost impossible task to perform in an impossibly short time. All that actually existed of the eventual musical drama King Kong were the songs, the lyrics and some dramatic ideas and scenes which, in spite of numerous attempts, had not yet been fused into a theatrically coherent script. The play had now to be written around an established musical framework, the right characters had to appear at the right time to sing words already set down, and the right action had to lead into predecided musical numbers. In Cape Town Leon and Harry spent hours late at night working together. Leon was in the midst of a season of taxing plays including Inherit the Wind and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Harry’s legal practice was most demanding. Leon, knowing theatre and the difficulties of casting, articulation and projection with which he would be faced, emphasized the need for simplicity. Knowing too that in South Africa there ware fine actors and fine singers, but very few actors who can sing or singers who can act, it was necessary that the bulk of the story should be told ‘extra‐
musically’. Many of the people were not articulate in the English language and to develop more than a few big speaking parts was impossible. They fell back on the simplest stage convention of all, the reminiscences of a ‘narrator’, in this instance three washerwomen and an old man, Dan Kuswayo. The singers spoke little but enacted what had already been explained. Again, the limitations imposed by the inexperience of all but a handful of the future cast, recruited from all walks of life, led to an emphasis not so much on the development of a continuous dramatic line, but on the use of a think line which would reach a number of theatrical ‘moments’ which Leon knew would work. Thus some of the most moving and exciting moments of the play were those whose basis was simplicity, a minimum of words and a maximum of effect. 569
Writing in the New Statesman and Nation in 1930, Sir Desmond McCarthy says of modern drama: ‘Scenic representation has implanted in a us a demand that the people should seem as real as the setting. . .modern self‐consciousness has screwed up the standard of consistency in character drawing. . . . But, above all, external life has in modern days become less violent, exciting and picturesque. The drama which stands therefore for reality in our times as the Greek drama stood for Greek life, and the drama of the Renaissance for the life of the Renaissance, is of necessity less demonstrative.’ In this the South African dramatist is fortunate, for reality in urban African life is, if not ‘violent, exciting and picturesque’, violent, vital and highly dramatic. The translation of reality to the stage is the translation of humour, colour, movement, dance and music as well as of violence and vitality. The times are turbulent and, for all their hopelessness, hopeful. Drama must be founded on living speech and the playwright can be much hampered by the dingy, threadbare speech in which the characters of realistic drama are made, if they are to be realistic, to express themselves today. To know urban Africans today is to have discovered an idiom in which to express the drams. J.M. Synge, in the preface to his Playboy of the Western World, writes: ‘All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story‐teller’s or the playwright’s hand as the rich cloaks and cresses of his time. It is probably that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink‐horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor 570
of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.’ And for Harry Bloom, writing King Kong, there are two parallels to be drawn. The device of the washerwomen is, if not ‘a chink in the floor’, an open window on any South African backyard. The problems of diction are overcome by the opportunity of the audience gradually to attune their ears to the speech. Synge goes on to say: ‘In countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.’ Harry Bloom’s knowledge of the township talk, the slang which is the only picturesque talk left today, a living idiom in which to write imaginatively, was the solution to the problem of language. Chapter 41 Short Story Writing in Black South Africa by 571
Bloke Modisane
The short story by black South Africans is the literary record of the
system of apartheid. It mirrors the total impact of that system upon
the Africans, the Coloureds (mixed-bloods) and the Indians, caught
in the complex mass of regulations and controls, restrictions and
prohibitions. The principal feature of these stories is the analytical
study of the African character, the psychological adjustment, the
accommodation to the system. This character is conceived as a hero
far removed from the standard code of morality—the anti-hero
concept. The heroes of these short stories are pickpockets, hijackers,
payroll robbers, beggars, and other generous assortments of social
mal-adjusts; acts of heroism are marked by games at beating the law,
stealing from whites—a calculated defiance against law and order.
The police, and whites in general, are the villains or the victims.
This short story hero is invested with a bird-of-passage morality;
concentrates into every minute or every hour the feverishness of
intense living. Our hero abandons himself to the lower freedoms—
the freedom from morality and the freedom of vice. And because of
the dichotomy of the social structure of South Africa, the hero
functions on the fringe of a culture which is rejecting him; in a society
which has labeled him, pedigreed him and then discriminates against
him
To understand this character—the motives behind the seemingly
irrational behaviour—it is necessary to understand the psychological
mores of the kind of society which produces this state of mind.
Nadine Gordimer—South Africa’s most perceptive writer—is
illuminating in her analysis of it:
“The greatest single factor in the making of our mores in South Africa
was and is and will be the colour question. It is far more than a
question or matter of prejudice or discrimination or conflict or
loyalties—we have built a morality on it. We have gone even deeper;
we have built our own sense of sin, and our own form of tragedy. We
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have added hazards of our own to man’s fate, and to save his soul he
must wrestle not only with the usual lust, greed and pride, but also
with a set of demons marked made in South Africa.”
A colour-caste society, like South Africa, must establish definite
identifiable groups with consistent group attitudes. In a society like
Britain’s, where the visibility of the social groups has been lowered
by the commercialization of the uniformity of dress and the
democratization of social institutions, it is still the Establishment
which is surrounded b the symbols of opulence; they dominate the
economy and therefore the social structure. But in South Africa,
where the different social groups have high visibility, the whites—a
numerical minority—have arrogated to themselves all the symbols of
wealth and authority, and have arranged themselves as a political
majority. The non-white groups—Africans, Coloureds, Indians—
form the numerical majority which is invested with symbols of
inferiority and are a minority politically.
Against the background of this social dichotomy, the short story
highlights attitudes between blacks and whites—extra-group
relations—and the attitudes among the blacks themselves—intragroup relations. The problems of race; the attitudes and the relations
that go with it are present in all life in South Africa.
We are born into race prejudice; we live with it; we die with it, and
are buried with it.
With all these groups arranged against each other—the one dedicated
to maintaining it, the other committed to smashing it—force becomes
implicit. Conflicts arise. And since race prejudice is written into the
law, there is no common arbiter; the parties must decide for
themselves The arbitrament of the sword becomes, if not the moral,
but the real arbiter; and thus force becomes the expression, and
violence the clarification of the society.
The tone of the short story is primarily that of protest; the African
character must arrange himself—survive—under the system with
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some personal dignity. His reaction is implicit in his behaviour to the
white man, and this behaviour will be determined by the
circumstance and the situation in which he finds himself. His
behaviour is changeable, and his pattern of behaviour may be
analyzed into these three forms: submission and accommodation;
aggression, and escape or flight.
In the first category the attitude of the African to the white man is
that of servility. He observes the proper forms of address, using the
appropriate terms of reference. He exploits these “proper forms” of
address when in trouble, or when seeking to extract favours from his
overlords. The African’s whole existence, his personal safety,
depends on depth studies of the South African white; thus the
African understands—he has to—the white man more than the white
man will ever know the African. The white man mourns with
lyricism the passing from the scene of “the good Native,” thus the
African in trouble will obsequiously resurrect the image of that noble
savage. This character merely accommodates the system without in
any way beginning to accept it.
The African character differs from the other non-white characters I
that he accepts—rather than regrets—the blackness of his face. In my
own short stories, the characters accept the physical reality of their
colour and then proceed to exploit it, in exactly the same way that a
beggar needs to be horribly deformed to be able to milk people’s
sympathy. In the short story, “The Professional Beggar,” to the
disability of being black is added physical deformity—a kind of
double indemnity. Nathan Scrurubele is educated to high-school
level, but is condemned to being a beggar for a living, not that he is
unable to earn a living, but because he is crippled.
He submits to their construction that to be disabled is to be
necessarily dependent upon the charity of a society which will
destroy a man’s pride rather than set aside the charity mentality.
Nathan Serurubele’s pride is too humiliated by the degradation, and
it is this humiliation which sustains him. He becomes a professional
beggar, organizing himself into a commercial enterprise. He is
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arrested, and the scene before ht magistrate is a cynical exploitation
of people’s sympathy; the disability is used mercilessly as a weapon
to assault the sensibilities of the whites:
“Your Lordship—my Honour—most of us beg because we have been
ostracized by our parents. . .by everybody. People treat us like lepers.
They have trained us, conditioned us, to look up to them for all the
things we need. No one wants to employ us—people are more
willing to offer us charity rather than give us jobs. All they ever do is
show us pity. We want to be given a chance to prove we’re as good as
anybody.”
This character has realized that ability is rejected inclusively with the
colour of his skin; that being black is analogous to being deformed –a
physical handicap in the athletics of earning a living. His personal
philosophy becomes thus: If anything is worth doing, it’s worth
doing well. Nathan Serurubele accepts this condition and the
commitment to it.
In South Africa, privilege is white, and non-whites are placed on
different levels of underprivileged. The Indians and the Coloureds
are situated on a higher level of privilege than the Africans.
Psychologically, the Indians and the Coloureds tend to gravitate
further and further from black, nearer to white. To the, it is a
misfortune not to have been born white, and they emphasize this by
their own brand of rejection of, and discrimination against, the
Africans. These two groups are obsessed by a white complex. This is,
perhaps, understandable in a society where white is the positive
standard, and black the negative; as it is implicit in the label, nonwhite.
In the short story, “The Bench,” by Richard Rives (whose story “The
Strike,” appeared in the April NEGRO DIGEST), an Indian school
teacher living in Cape Town, the indignation at being non-white
instead of white is shown as the motivation behind the social protest.
It is not white domination which is being protested against, but its
singling out of those who were not born white. It is the effect it has
575
and not the condition itself which is under fire. Being white and
being privileged are confused to mean the same thing. Richard Rives
captures the essential tone of the ambivalence to the colour white.
The scene is a political meeting and a speaker says:
“We form an integral part of a complex society in which a vast
proportion of the population is denied the very basic right of
existence, a society that condemns a man to an inferior position
because he has the misfortune to be born black, a society that can only
retain its precarious social and economic position at the expense of an
enormous oppressed mass.”
The Coloureds and the Indians are a lighter skin colour than the
Africans; a pigmentorial quality which places them closer to white.
The Coloureds, in particular, since they are publicly described as the
“appendages of the whites,” request—by commensurate
approximation—proportional privileges, improved conditions in
their social status and gradual integration.
Acceptance and accommodation, as a reaction to social prejudice, is
determined by the situation—as illustrated in the short stories
themselves-the individual finds himself in. Thus, the African
policeman, the teacher in Bantu Education schools, the people who
serve on tribal councils, school boards, etc., have to accommodate the
system; even if it is implied that they are the instruments of their own
oppression.
The next pattern of behaviour analyzed by the short stories is that of
aggression directed against the system.
Like America, South Africa has a frontier or voortrekker mentalist; a
savage throw-back to the days when the law dangled in the holster or
the shot gun, and justice was swift, informal and prejudice.
Lynchings and gorse whippings are deep in the traditions of these
countries. Both are compulsive addicts to horse operas. Under stress,
the average man in America and in South Africa will resort to
violence.
576
In South Africa, violence exists as the expression of the public
conscience; this violence is contained in the law, it is the instrument
of maintaining law and order. The African character lives in the
screaming wake of this violence, and unlike most South African
attitudes, violence is truly colour blind. Compulsively driven by
frustration, the African directs his aggression against himself. This ingroup aggression is directed against the more successful. Africans,
who are, by and large, resented for being successful, because success
is seen as the quality of being white. On the surface, the motives for
this aggression may be for material gain or just lawless rebellion
against form and cohesion, where form and cohesion are symbols of
authority, which is white.
This African character lives on so close to death that death becomes
the reflection of the empty gestures of the living; a defiance against
his life. Death revenges the African character against life; it is both
sides of a single reality. Death is the master who must be paid. And
although this character may fear death he is fascinated by it; because
he is familiar with it. He courts it, he jokes about it, he dares it, he
surrenders himself to it, and then death becomes a refuge from the
burden of being black in white South Africa.
In the short stories of Arthur Maimane, a journalist on a London
news agency, death purges his characters from being black. His
characters defy death; they run from the police; ignore the order to
stop, and defy the warning shots; compulsively running—running
away from South Africa into death. Arthur Maimane’s stories “Just A
Tsotsi” and “A Manner of Speaking,” probes the depths of
desperation which his characters have reached. In the story, “Just A
Tsotsi,” his character is arrested for a Pass offence, and during the
assault upon him by the police, he breaks from them and starts
running. He is ordered to stop, but he continues running:
“’Now he’s asking for trouble,’ Hannes said, seeing a chance to
vindicate himself. With one fluid motion he grabbed his rifle from
where it was leaning against the wall and fell down on one knee. ‘He
577
won’t be cheeky any more after this.’ He fired deliberately low, the
bullet hitting the ground between the running boy’s legs and
ricocheting at angle with a whine. The boy yelped and ran faster.
‘Don’t kill him, Hannes!’ the corporal said, in a low, tight voice.
Hannes laughed, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for!’
His next shot whined close by the boy’s ear. With another frightened
yelp the boy crouched down and started running zig-zag fashion. He
had almost reached the gate now. He straightened up to grab at the
post and swing round it. Hannes grinned and fluidly shifted his rifle
to the hand holding the post. He fired two quick shots, smashing the
hand with the first and hitting the boy’s head with the second as it
came round and above the post.”
The violence strikes out against everybody, and perhaps with more
eroticism against ourselves. The incidence of drunkenness, crime and
violence in urban black communities is alarmingly high. The anger of
the African character is always a going to extremes. We love parties,
nice times, noise and people; we are sweating in a world where death
is all around us, a world in which only death has value. In our
attempts to obliterate time—the minutes of our lives—we intoxicate
ourselves with orgiastic pleasures, noise and people; and then when
we are dizzy we annihilate ourselves. We kill each other for pleasure,
for revenge, for caprice.
Aggression directed against the whites—the out-groups—is more
complex and variable; it may be physical as demonstrated in the high
incidents of crime and violence; or more overt, as on the personal
level, where insolence against the white man is common. There is
always some sort of rebellion against the race attitudes. In the story,
“A Manner of Speaking,” by Arthur Maimane, the character is
aggressively insistent on maintaining his dignity; by being courteous
but refusing to conform to the stereotype of the African. Being
insolent or cheeky—by South African standards—becomes a game,
which at the end of the story is to cost him his life:
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“After a minute he coughed. The young woman turned her head
slowly. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized him. She looked out of
the window again. He coughed louder.
“Ja! What do you want?’ she asked, without looking at him. . .
‘Two tuppence stamps, please.’
She took the four steps towards the counter slowly, hands on broad
hips and head stuck out ahead of the body. She stood across the
counter from him, her grey eyes boring into his.
‘Say Missis,’ she said quietly.
The middle-aged woman looked up from her novel and studied the
two.
He remained silent.
‘If you don’t say Missis, you’re not getting your stamps!’
‘Look, mevrou, all I want is two tuppence stamps. I’ve said Please, and
that should be enough.’
‘Say Missis—or get out.’
He stared back for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and walked
out.”
Physical violence strikes out against everybody.
The African character is always reacting, scratching at the wall of
colour prejudice; accommodating it, being aggressive to it or looking
around for escape—in compensation—or taking flight from it; going
to other parts of Africa or running away to Europe in search of a
579
gentler political climate. Escape from the colour bar is the subtlest of
the reactions of the African character, the Coloured and the Indian.
The South African public image is white; the values of that society are
white, and all the sex symbols are white; and consequently the
Africans and the Coloureds have to arrange themselves under the
code of this standard. Since to be white is to be privileged, the
Coloureds with low visibility—fair enough to pass for white—escape
into the domain of the whites, and the Africans of lighter skin—the
less clearly visible Africans—steal into the structure of the Coloured
group.
For the Coloureds it means the end of living in social igloos, the end
of discrimination. It means sliding into white society, access into
white restaurants, cinemas, theaters, bars, and other symbols of white
privilege. It is freedom. To the light-skinned African it is an end to
the regulations and the strangulations of the document called the
Pass. Passing himself off as a Coloured will give the African freedom
of movement, the opportunity to select and accept the job of his own
choice and the relief from being at the black bottom of the colour
scale.
This escape into another colour, the rationalizations for it are
illustrated in my own short story, “The Have-Nots”:
“Why go all sentimental? This is a battle between the Haves and the
Have-Nots. The Haves have made being black too much of a burden
and the only way to survive is to fool them by playing their own
game. They made white a symbol of privilege and comfort; so I
decided to be as near white as I can bleach. It’s not my fault I’m lightskinned—nothing like enough to pass for lily white that is—but
sufficiently to masquerade as a Coloured.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, raising my hand as a sign of peace. ‘What’s in
being a Native, anyway? Black. Devil black. Pitch-forking devil black.
That’s all—just black, black, black! Well, I don’t wanna be black—not
any more.’
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‘You’ll never be a white man,’ Steve said, contemptuously.
‘I don’t wanna be a white man,’ I shouted. ‘I just want to be white—
just white.’”
Of particular interest is the way in which the non-white groups—
particularly the Africans—will live with this situation, and even
retain their sense of humour, without in any way beginning to accept
it. The non-white groups have been educated into an acceptance of
their own inferiority; and in some insidious way this educating has
had some effect. For this doctrine to be accepted—or even
suspected—the education into this accommodation, or even
acceptance, will be directed towards elevating whiteness as some
unattainable ideal, some unobtainable standard. All ambition will be
directed physically towards, or to an association with it.
The Coloureds, especially the ones with a darker skin have a
psychosis about marrying Coloured girls with a much fairer
complexion. This woman becomes the substitute for white.
Alternately, the African man seeks to marry a light-skinned African
girl—preferably a Coloured girl. This pre-occupation with skin
colour is a feature in the story, “Forbidden Love,” by D. Can Themba.
The African character falls in love with a Coloured girl—his personal
substitute for white. His psychological rejection of black. The
question of colour foreshadows the conflict:
“She turned her head and placed her chin on his chest. ‘Somehow,
Mike,’ she tried to explain, softened again now. ‘I feel trapped by a
doubly guilty shame. I’m ashamed that it’s my people who are in the
foreground of every move against your people—ashamed of my
father whom I love, but who’s violent in his hatred of Africans;
ashamed of my sister, Louisa, who ought to feel nearer your people,
but hates them so unreasonably; ashamed of my brother’s shame for
having been re-classified as the African; ashamed of my mother’s
silence when I suspect (I know it!) that she disapproves of their
attitudes. And then, Sweetie, sometimes when I listen to them all, I—
581
I—I am ashamed, in a queer way, that I hate myself, in a queer way,
that I hate myself for this secret love of ours.’”
Another form taken by escape behaviour is one expressed by means
of compensation. The African character is obsessed with easing his
condition. He surrounds himself with the symbols of the society
which is rejecting him. He wants to be accepted, he wants to qualify,
to be civilized, so he develops a love for academic trappings and the
related trinkets of opulence. He flaunts his wealth; he drives in big
cars, prefers public-library-sized houses filled with enormous pieces
of furniture. He erects these monuments both as a symbol of success
and to his own sense of insecurity.
In South Africa, where opportunity and wealth are white, such an
African reasons that if to be white is to be wealthy, then conversely,
to be wealthy should be to be white. Thus, the African buys not a car,
but a status symbol. The car must be big and flashy—preferably a
Cadillac—for success has to have a high visibility. This reaction is
also manifest in the vulgarity of the make-up African women wear. If
to be white is to be painted with make-up, the African woman in her
search of this ideal adds on the paint with generous vulgarity;
straightens the tropic curl from her hair by burning the hair with a
hot comb; and she bleaches her face with lotions. It is necessary that
this should be done with vulgarity; whatever she does must be better
than the best.
In a tedious succession of escapist short stories, published in “Drum,”
“Zonk,” and other South African popular magazines, the African,
Indian and the Coloured characters are paraded as gaudily successful
boxing promoters, tough private detectives and other cardboard
images of romanticism. Yet even against this background the escapist
short story hero is seldom—if ever—on the side of formal law and
order. His efforts are directed at flaunting the law.
But in the short stories of Ezekiel Mphahlele, famous educator
and writer, the characters do not easily fall into the categories
defined in this analysis; primarily because the author believes
582
that the African character should be portrayed as a purely
fictional character, and not as a mould cast in racial tensions. In
his stories the African exists on a level far removed from the
tensions of the colour bar, which is not necessarily a hazard in
his life. Author Mphahlele insists upon the African portrayed
as a human character wrestling with the basic hazards of man:
greed, lust and pride. In the story, “The Suitcase,” Ezekiel
Mphahlele emphasizes the motive of greed behind Timi’s
action of claiming the suitcase abandoned in a bus.
But behind every motive is cause and effect. The position of the
individual in any society—in particular that of South Africa, and to a
lesser extent that of Britain—is determined by the colour or social
caste into which that character is born.
That Timi is black is implicit in the young white typist’s impersonal
attitude towards him. The same attitude is seen in the foreman. They
are not addressing themselves to Timi, the individual, but to a black
mask. Timi reacts by smiling knowingly. This reaction is particularly
interesting in that Timi accommodates the de-personalization:
“The grim reality of his situation returned to him with all its
cold and aching pain. Today he had been led on something of a
wild goose chase. He had been to three places where the
chances of getting work were promising. He had failed. At one
firm he was told: ‘We’ve already got a boy, John.’ At the second
firm a tiny typist told him: ‘You’re too big Jim. The boss wants
a small boy—about eighteen, you know’ Then she had gone on
with her typing, clouding her white face with cigarette smoke.
At the third place a short, pudgy white man put down his price
in a squeaky voice: ‘Two pounds ten a week.’ Three pounds ten
a week, Timi had said. ‘Take it or leave it, my boy,’ was the
proprietor’s final word. Timi chuckled to himself as he thought
of the man’s face, his fat white cheeks and small blinking eyes,”
Ezekiel Mphahlele’s white characters in “The Suitcase” are not just
human characters; they are South African white. The human character
583
in any fiction has to function within the society which produces that
character.
In the story, “Down the Quiet Street,” also by Ezekiel Mphahlele,
there is no mention of the white figure, nor is the colour question
implied. The characters come to life, vividly, with all the humour that
is African. The orchestration of the characters is flawless. It is a
recount of the story of the endless funeral processions which trailed
down Nadia Street week after week: “short ones, long ones, poor
insignificant ones; rich, snobbish ones.”
There is a kind of escapist romanticism in the setting of this short
story; and but for the smuggling of liquor the story might be set
outside South Africa. The reasons behind the liquor smuggling is not
because prohibition is general, but that it operates against Africans
only. The African must drink, and to do this he must be one jump
ahead of the law. No device is left unexplored, even the sanctity of
the funeral ritual is violated. During one of those inevitable human
accidents, an incident reveals the secret of those funeral processions.
One of the coffins cracks and “a miniature avalanche of bottles came
down to the ground.”
In his more angry moods, Ezekiel Mphahlele’s characters protest
against the colour bar and against white attitudes.
All life in South Africa is dominated by the impact of one colour
upon the other. The colour bar motivates all our actions, all our
reactions and all our attitudes. The whites act in a manner
determined by the roles they have to play in a dominant society. The
Africans, the Indians and the Coloureds react to one another and
towards the white man in the various forms outlined in this analysis.
They may accept or accommodate the colour bar, in accordance to the
situation they are in. They may be aggressive in their rejection of the
situation or find a way of escape or take flight from it.
But there is always the physical presence of the colour bar. Examined
in this essay are the social conditions and group attitudes which
584
shape the pattern of the South African black short story. All nuances
of life, of human relationships, are contained in it. Perhaps in time
other influences will insinuate different attitudes, order a new society
which will have a more fluid social mobility with a new set of
relationships. The short story will be there to interpret the new
society.
Meantime, for so long as the social structure in present day south
Africa persists, for so long will the African—rather the South
African—character “wrestle with a set of demons marked: made in
South Africa.”
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Chapter 42
Writing in South Africa
by
Nat Nakasa
(Based on a talk given at the University of Witwatersrand under the auspices of the English Academy of South Africa) As I was getting ready for tonight, a friend of mine gave me what was, undoubtedly, a piece of genuine, brotherly advice. “See that you represent us well,” he said, “you must not give a bad impression. Remember, you have a responsibility to the African people.” I wish to say to you what I said in reply to my friend. I am not speaking tonight as a representative of anybody at all. My intention is to let out a number of broad generalizations in human terms, base on my impressions of various things. Admittedly, some of the sentiments I express will be drawn from ideas that I share with some of my friends and contemporaries. But the rest of my fellow tribesmen and all the millions of my kinsmen are not committed in any way to the thoughts I am soon to discuss here. This is simply a personal statement fro me to you. 586
That the English language is used widely and increasingly in the African community today, is a matter which I believe to be well known to all of us here. Without much persuasion from outsiders, black men have chosen English as a means for the expression of their national aspirations; they have chosen English as the most powerful single instrument of communication with the world and with themselves. In their joint use of English, Africans reach with greater ease the various levels of common ground which are of importance in the process of eliminating tribal division with all its unwelcome consequences. To the African, English has become a symbol of success, the vehicle of his painful protest against social injustice and spiritual domination by those who rule him. The newspapers we have held in high esteem are in English: mass political organizations which sought to rally Africans against white rule have always conducted their business in English; in our tribal languages which continue to be in use, most of the borrowed words area from English. One would, therefore, expect the African to take much interest in all English writing, especially as much of that writing is likely to concern himself, his ways and his personality. This, however, is not the case. The Africans I know, who have taken any interest in writing, spent more of their time reflecting on the work of people other than South African writers. There are, obviously, exceptions like Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer and others in whose work the African is represented as something larger than a functional being, something more than a lesser being lacking in some of the dimensions that go to make a whole man. 587
During the last days of Sophiatown, nearly ten years ago, you were more likely to walk into a conversation centered around James Joyce or John Osborne or Langston Hughes instead of local names like Gertrude Millin or Olive Schreiner. To me, the trends which developed in Sophiatown are important because Sophiatown is the only place I know where African writers and aspirant writers ever lived in close proximity, almost as a community. I have in mind people like Alfred Hutchinson (Road to Ghana), Arthur Maimane, now a journalist and short story writer in London, Todd Matshikiza (Chocolates for My Wife), Ezekiel Mphahlele (The African Image), Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane. If anybody was ever going to examine South African writing from an African’s point of view and pass honourable judgment, these were the likely candidates. All of them are now exiled in Europe and England, a state of affairs forced upon them by political developments in South Africa. Before these men left, Sophiatown had a heart like Greenwich Village or Harlem. Writers wrote, yes, very little and when they talked, as I have suggested, less and less was said about South African writing. With the possible exception of Mphahlele, who made a thorough investigation of South African writing for a university thesis, most or all of us were content to spew out observations on the basis of often embarrassingly scanty research. I like to think that this was because with us, virtually everything South African was always synonymous with mediocrity. This blinding prejudice on our part was the direct result of a sense of grievance, a feeling of rejection by the powerful hierarchy of the country’s culture. We were barred and still are from the white theatres where important plays are put on. They wouldn’t even let us sit in the lights room once when Lewis Nkosi and I pleaded to see a play in one of Johannesburg’s white theatres. The South African 588
white writers, save for the exceptions, belonged to another camp, as it were, to a closed, hostile world. Thus when I first came across the writings of Peter Abrahams, I swallowed them up in rapid succession, permitting no criticism to take shape wi